SEO & Startups: Having a Plan Early to Maximize Results Later

In the first quarter of 2021 alone, more than 300,000 new businesses were started in the United States. It seems that even a global pandemic isn’t enough to quash the entrepreneurial spirit. When running a startup, you’ll want every advantage you can get to make it through your rounds of funding. At the same time, you also understand the need to be lean and mean, and save costs wherever possible. Some things are just going to have to come later. One thing startups often neglect out of the gate is SEO. We may be biased, but this is a mistake. Based on our experience, startups that bake SEO best practices into their website from the get-go, see meaningful results far faster than those that don’t. In fact, by neglecting an organic strategy, you may build up SEO debt that becomes difficult to recover from down the road. Here, we’ll go over some SEO essentials all startups should keep in mind when launching their websites.

Market Research

As they say, information is ammunition. Sometimes the hardest part of search engine optimization is knowing just what you should optimize for. Targeting long-tail keywords and carving out a niche is always a good idea. But how do you know what that niche should be? Completing market research early, with a focus on keywords, can help you maintain good SEO when building your website. That way, you don’t have to spend the time going back and rewording your website text to better show up in search results later. Bonus: by conducting keyword research, you can quickly discover if your target market is even organically searching for your product or service. Also, creating a detailed sitemap that assigns thoughtful keywords to every page will help guide your content writer’s hand as well as avoid keyword cannibalization.

Design Your Website for Success

Speaking about websites… A good part of technical SEO can be found just in the design and layout of your website. Simply put, the better your website’s layout is—in terms of headings, links, and navigation—the better your website is going to perform in search engines. Of course, the more intuitive your website is to use, the more likely people are going to stick around and use it. Ensuring your website is technically sound from the start will give you the best chance at succeeding organically quickly. Keep a close eye on things like:

• Mobile Performance
• URL Structures
• Meta Data
• Loading Time
• Website Speed
• Safe Browsing

Share the News

It’s important when running a startup that investors and potential clients are always excited about what you are doing. Using your company blog to announce internal developments is a good way to get into the habit of creating content, even before you’ve developed a dedicated content marketing plan. These pages are also a great place to start using your keyword research to get your foot in the door and start tracking trends.

Off-Site Strategies

If you’re persistent, nimble, and lucky, you’ll eventually start to see some returns on all of your efforts. In fact, you may find an inbound, organic strategy is of great interest to your business. If you can focus on getting good reviews from the very start, this will give you a significant boost of organic traffic. Establishing high-quality backlinks at the start is also important – as long as these are relevant to your site’s product/service, and from high-quality sources. To start, these links can drive referral traffic. But as time goes on, these links will pass along link equity and help you rank organically for specific search terms.

Hire an SEO Agency

If you’re interested in making SEO a key component of your business’s long-term marketing strategy, your best chance at success is to partner with a B2B SEO marketing agency like Pedestal. We’ve helped a wide range of companies of all sizes keep ahead in the SEO race. Running a startup is a lot of work. Let us focus on making sure you have a strong digital marketing position, so you can focus on finding startup success.