SEO for Startups: Proven Strategies for Higher Rankings

Statistics show that more than 90% of startups eventually fail, and 10% of new businesses are unlikely to last beyond their initial year.

One major reason for this failure is an ineffective marketing strategy. This emphasizes the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for startups. SEO can create a strong basis for lead generation, boost brand awareness, improve revenue, and help you stand out in a difficult and competitive marketplace.

In this blog post, we will explore the most effective SEO strategies for startups and offer valuable insights and actionable steps to achieve success.

What is SEO for Startups?

SEO for startups focuses on enhancing a new business’s online visibility to potential customers searching for products or services on search engine results pages (SERPs), consequently driving organic traffic to your website.

With over 5.35 billion active internet users worldwide, SEO is not merely about drawing traffic; it’s about attracting the right kind of visitors who convert into leads and paying customers.

Moreover, there are more than 1.1 billion websites on the internet, all vying for the attention and clicks of the same audience, making it difficult for startup businesses to establish stability in a competitive sector. 

These statistics showcase the need for a better SEO plan to outcompete other businesses in your industry.  A tailored startup SEO strategy can assist you in navigating this competition, enhancing your rankings in SERPs, and generating organic traffic to your site.

Reasons Why Startups Should Invest in SEO

If you’re unsure whether SEO is right for you or need evidence to support your SEO plan, here are four reasons why startups should adopt strong SEO strategies. 

Reason # 1. SEO Delivers Scalable, Cost-Effective Traffic

SEO allows you to generate a steady stream of organic visitors without having to pay for each individual click. For instance, Ahrefs brings in over 11.9 million visitors a month from search engines, which would require hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly if acquired through paid ads. While content optimization and marketing are necessary for SEO, they remain significantly more affordable over time compared to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Reason # 2. Builds Brand Credibility & Trust

Achieving higher positions in search engines such as Google or Bing fosters credibility. Users often have more trust in organic search results compared to paid ads, which means that SEO can help establish your startup as a reliable authority in your industry.

Reason # 3. The Market Trend is Clear

A survey conducted in 2014 indicated that 71% of B2B decision-makers begin their purchasing journey with a general search instead of seeking a specific brand. This highlights the growing importance of SEO in drawing in potential buyers who are in the early stages of their decision-making process.

Reason # 4. Supports Long-Term Growth

In contrast to paid advertising, which stops producing traffic once funding ceases, SEO efforts continue to drive organic traffic over a long period. The earlier you invest in SEO, the more significant the long-term advantages you will gain.

Best SEO Blueprint for Startups

1. Establish Clear SEO Goals and Define Key Outcomes
2. Create a Measurement Plan – Identify How to Track Performance
3. Analyze Your Website’s Technical SEO With a Comprehensive Crawl
4. Explore Branded Search Potential and Strengthen Online Reputation
5. Conduct Non-branded Keyword Research for Long-Tail Gains
6. Strategically Prioritize Content Development and Optimization
7. Assess Website UX, Structure, Navigation, and Mobile Experience
8. Identify and Implement On-Page SEO Enhancements
9. Acquire High-quality Backlinks for Your Business Website

Establish Clear SEO Goals and Define Key Outcomes

This ultimately relies on the kind of business you operate and how it generates revenue.

Here’s a summary of different business models and their income structures:

Local Businesses: Consider places like restaurants and physical stores. SEO objectives for these entities would probably focus on optimizing for “near me” inquiries, as well as voice and mobile searches. A significant portion of retail shoppers look for product details on their mobile devices before visiting the place physically.  

[Also read: Voice Search & Local SEO: Capturing “Near Me” Traffic in a Changing Landscape]

E-commerce: These businesses are particularly concerned with driving direct sales through their websites and ensuring a seamless technical SEO framework. An SEO aim for an e-commerce entity might include improving rankings for keywords that signal the buying intent and reducing the bounce rates of product pages for traffic arriving via organic search.  

SaaS: The topic of SEO for SaaS companies is expansive as these businesses primarily focus on lead generation, customer acquisition, and user retention through their digital platforms. SEO strategies for SaaS companies often involve targeting high-intent keywords related to problem-solving, comparisons, and product alternatives. 

A strong technical SEO foundation, including fast-loading pages, schema markup, and mobile optimization, also plays a key role in improving conversions and user experience for various SaaS models. 

Additional examples of broader SEO objectives might entail:

• Driving more qualified visitors to your product pages. 
• Increasing your startup’s authority on a specific subject matter.  
• Boosting awareness within a targeted industry that may require your product.   
• Enhancing user engagement, average dwell time, scroll depth, etc.  

Specific SEO targets could include:

• Increasing traffic to the blog page by 50% over the next year.  
• Doubling the number of new visitors to the website.  
• Attracting leads to your site from a particular sector – like real estate, construction, etc.  
• Growing the number of transactions on an e-commerce landing page.
• Raising email signups from organic traffic by 10%.  

Create a Measurement Plan – Identify How to Track Performance

Performance tracking is crucial to estimate the success of your SEO campaign. There are several fundamental steps you should undertake here:

• Establish Google Search Console.  
• Set up Google Analytics.  
• Implement Goal Conversion Tracking within Analytics.   
• Outline all your metrics and correlate them with their respective data sources.  
• Link marketing automation and CRM to your lead-capturing tools.

Analyze Your Website’s Technical SEO With a Comprehensive Crawl

This step encompasses a significant advancement for the health of your business website, so it is essential to prioritize and focus on all the essential elements.

Here are the key aspects to check in a comprehensive SEO audit:

• Duplicate content: This can be a significant problem for e-commerce sites, but it may also occur on any website. Avoiding duplicate content is essential, as it can harm your ranking by causing web pages to compete with one another. 
• Meta robots: You need to avoid unintentionally noindexing important pages or nofollowing valuable backlinks. This sometimes happens when developers transition changes from staging to production
• Broken backlinks: These are a major source of lost link equity. You can identify them using tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Moz. 
• Robots.txt: Developers may temporarily restrict search engines from accessing certain parts of their site and forget to revert that change. Therefore, it’s essential to review your robots.txt file to verify that your site is accessible to crawlers.
• Pages with long load times: Site speed is a ranking factor and affects user experience. You can access this information at the URL level using Google’s page speed insights API. 
• Improper redirects & redirect chains: These issues can undermine valuable link equity and negatively impact user experience. 
• URL structure: It’s important to keep URLs clear, concise, consistent, and relevant to keywords. 

[Also read: Technical Auditing Tools: Screaming Frog & Sitebulb for SMBs]

Explore Branded Search Potential and Strengthen Online Reputation

Having a strong online reputation can provide small businesses with a competitive edge. Start by entering your brand’s name into Google and examine the results that appear.  

You should look for the following elements:  

• Verify that your site metadata accurately conveys your brand’s narrative and clearly describes your products.  
• Evaluate and apply schema markup options for your brand.  
• Ensure that your website links and social media profiles are correctly configured and consistent.  
• Scroll to the bottom of the search results page and check the “searches related” section to understand searchers’ interests about your brand.  
• Utilize auto-suggest to discover what long-tail brand queries are generated for your brand.   

Conduct Non-branded Keyword Research for Long-Tail Gains

A useful strategy is to explore template keywords, as they often help increase your email subscriber base and are generally easier to rank for than more competitive commercial terms.  

Here’s a simple and step-by-step plan to perform non-branded keyword research:

• Initially, break down your keyword research into topical categories. Focus on broader segments of head terms instead of specific keywords at this stage.  
• This is generally reflected in a website’s structure or navigation. A handy trick is to adopt topical categories from a competitor’s website.  
• Next, determine how to establish topical authority by concentrating on keywords that are low in difficulty but still relevant to your business.  
• A quick and efficient method to do this is by creating persona-specific long-tail content using Google’s auto-suggest feature.  

Strategically Prioritize Content Development and Optimization

Once you have identified several long-tail opportunities and possibly generated some additional content ideas, it’s time to prioritize them. Typically, it is suggested to prioritize keywords based on high volume, low difficulty, significant CTR potential, and high relevance or importance.  

These are the actions you can take to streamline your content development efforts.  

• Gather data from various keyword tools like Auto-Suggest, Related Searches, Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush.  
• Understand the searcher intent behind the keywords – you should give priority to bottom-of-funnel keywords since they are more likely to drive revenue and sales but avoid selecting the most challenging, high-volume ones. 
• Begin with smaller, targeted keywords and gradually work your way up the funnel.  
• Compile keyword metrics such as search volume, CTR potential, and difficulty score, and prioritize them in your content according to your business objectives.

Assess Website UX, Structure, Navigation, and Mobile Experience

The user experience on a website is crucial for SEO success. If users find it difficult to navigate your pages, struggle to view content on mobile devices, overwhelmed by intrusive ads or pop-ups, and fail to explore your site’s structure deeply, you won’t achieve good rankings.

Here are several actions you can take:

• Identify drop-offs in your conversion processes: This is particularly useful if you operate an e-commerce site or a SaaS business with intricate funnels. Discover precisely where users are abandoning the process and the reasons for it. 
• Website structure and navigation: Your site must be organized clearly so that users and search engines can easily find what they are looking for without frustration. Is your navigation streamlined and intuitive? Is your internal linking setup cohesive? If it’s not, you should address this promptly, as your ranking may suffer if users and search engines find your website structure unsatisfactory.
• Monitor engagement through heatmap tools: The capabilities of heat maps for marketers today are remarkable. You can track where visitors leave, click, move, and interact with a webpage, among other insights.

[Also read: Heatmaps & User Behavior Tools: Boosting SEO and User Experience]

Identify and Implement On-Page SEO Enhancements

On-page optimization focuses on aligning your content with appropriate keywords in relation to user intent based on their position in the buying cycle.

Here’s a clearer and more organized version of your on-page SEO checklist:

• Identify and evaluate your target keyword: Select a pertinent keyword and analyze SERPs to gauge its ranking potential.
• Optimize your title tag: Position the target keyword at the start, keep it under 60 characters, and use captivating language to enhance click-through rates.
• Create a compelling meta description: Incorporate the target keyword and formulate an enticing call to action to drive clicks.
• Organize your headings wisely: Make sure the H1 features the main keyword, while H2s should include related secondary keywords.
• Implement effective URL optimization: Keep URLs short, embed the target keyword, use clear categories, eliminate unnecessary stop words, and substitute underscores with hyphens.
• Correctly use canonical tags: Avoid duplicate content issues by indicating the proper canonical URL.
• Feature authoritative outbound links: Link to 1-3 high-quality, relevant external sources to enhance credibility.
• Optimize images for SEO: Utilize descriptive filenames and alt text containing the target keyword, and ensure images are appropriately sized for quick loading.

Acquire High-quality Backlinks for Your Business Website 

Lastly, build a strong backlink profile by acquiring high-quality backlinks from relevant websites and forums. When working on backlink building, ensure to follow all the below-mentioned tips:

• Begin by keeping track of unlinked mentions of your brand. Search for your brand name, domain, and names of founders/executives to discover unlinked mentions.  
• Avoid focusing on high-volume backlink acquisition; instead, prioritize quality.
• Investigate how and where your competitors are acquiring links, then seek links from those same sources.  
• Conduct interviews and involve influencers in your marketing campaigns.
• Identify relevant business listings and directories to ensure your site is mentioned and linked.   

Summing It Up

SEO is challenging, especially for startups with limited budgets that aren’t employing a focused approach to their search marketing strategy. However, by concentrating on small and achievable milestones you can compete well in your industry.  

A foolproof SEO strategy demands a careful approach and technical expertise. If you lack the time, skills, or resources to execute it correctly, it is recommended to hire a professional SEO agency for startups. 

Rank & Scale is a leading SEO company offering expert services to small and mid-sized businesses. We can handle the intricate work and offer you tailored and comprehensive services that address your startup’s SEO requirements, allowing you to concentrate on providing value to your customers.