The most successful startups thrive because their owners stick to the original vision and can act fast. Those aren’t the only reasons, though.
Their success hinges on social skills, discipline, and ability to adjust or adapt to changes.
Some startups do all that yet don’t enjoy the desired success, either. For them, the lack of success could be because of failure to adhere to SEO principles, best practices, and techniques.
This article is a complete guide for optimizing your startup’s website to take that one step – or several steps – closer to success!
Decide Hosting:
Hosting is the primary requirement of any online business and choosing the right hosting package is essential.
Mostly startups do not have much traffic and need to transfer huge amount of data to hosting.
There will be a limit specified on chosen hosting package as how much traffic a server can handle.
You should check uptime, regular back up, maintenance cost, CDN, web cache, malware protection, free domain (if they provide), multiple servers, technical support and many other features.
If your business outgrows, then you can upgrade your package for updated features and ability to handle increased traffic.
On-Page SEO
Lastly, do not ignore the importance of on-page SEO. Without it, your website and startup will not have achieved the desired level of SEO. Here, the emphasis is on keywords.
Title tags and URL are also important. While working on those two, remember to pay more attention to the need for creating suitable page headlines, or H1.
Powerful modifiers are just as crucial for the success of your SEO campaign as anything you will ever imagine. The content, too, deserves some love from you.
Therefore, learn the tips and tricks for optimizing each paragraph. With these SEO tips in place, your startup has a much higher chance of success.
Off-Page SEO:
Off-Page SEO is equally important as On-Page SEO. There are certain activities a startup can do to bring its search ranking up in SERP.
Few activities include, create shareable content, outreach to influencers, contribute as a guest author, social media engagement, forum and video submission, etc.
Many people refer Off-Page SEO to link building, but the scope is not limited. It is beyond a link building which also includes, brand promotion and social media marketing.
Off-Page SEO gives a specific ideal that how the world perceives your website.
At the end, a website with high quality content and user oriented or useful could earn more backlinks from other website.
Prioritizing Google-Oriented Best Practices
Startups have a distinct disadvantage – compared to their competitors – for the sole reason that they have not been in business for long.
For this reason, they must demonstrate a willingness to learn all SEO tips and tricks.
In this regard, your startup should be up to speed with all Google-oriented best practices.
A few years ago, many firms employed black-hat practices that Google has now curbed. Therefore, your focus should be on long-term organic growth.
To do this, you should prioritize:
- Semantic relationships that are influenced by AI
- Embrace voice searches
- Open your arms wide to visual searches courtesy of mobile devices
Focusing on Security
More importantly, startups that invest in SSL certificate show their appreciation for website security. The certificate provides the secure connection that your startup needs.
More crucially, it provides the sort of assurance that gives your clients – including first time or repeated visitors – to your website.
If your website appears well secured, you can rest safe in the knowledge that clients will not hesitate to transact.
The certificate makes your business trustworthy. It validates you and everything you do on the website!
Invest in SEO Toolbox
Furthermore, startups have no option other than investing in the appropriate toolboxes. Such a toolbox contains several tools.
An example of these is audit tools. You also need backlink audit tools in addition to keyword discover tools.
Tools that help you to analyze the competition are equally important in the industry. The market is full of a massive diversity of tools.
For this reason, you should invest in some research to identify what your business needs. Cost of the tools shouldn’t deter or encourage you to buy.
Working with Goals
SEO won’t work for you if you have no goals. Therefore, always start with goals, first. Afterward, you can build the entire strategy on the goals you just built.
Goals help you to monitor your success or lack thereof. They also help you to define the changes worth making. Without goals, your startup could face the same fate as that of a rudderless ship. Make sure that the goals are as clear as possible.
Remove all ambiguity from them. They should be measurable and attainable too, though it doesn’t hurt to be a little more ambitious!
Reviewing Technical SEO
Additionally, you may want to set aside time for reviewing the technical aspects of SEO. To do this, you would first need to learn how to crawl the website. When you do this, you could then proceed to dissect the report you obtain from all that crawling.
More importantly, a high caliber SEO audit would also be necessary, here. Through it, your focus should be on duplicate content, meta robots, robots.txt, improper redirects, and all redirect chains. Do not forget to spare time for 404 pages, broken media assets, broken links, and URL structure!
Finally, a startup will have to do many things and learn from others and own mistakes as the journey to become a reputed site demands a long journey. Until your target audience has discovered about your business, they will not come to your directly.
The above tips for better ranking in SERP will help startup surely in long run.