SEO for Startups 2022 | Everything You Need to Know

Doing SEO for startups isn’t a walk in the park, but it also doesn’t have to be a mystery. Whether you’ve never heard of SEO or you simply want some better SEO strategies to implement into your startup’s digital marketing, you’ve come to the right place.

Keep reading for our step-by-step guide on SEO for startups, the SEO tools you’ll need to be successful and much more. Let’s begin!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It’s the process of using strategies and tactics to help your website rank higher on search engine results pages (also known as SERPs) and driving organic (non-paid) traffic to your website.

Search engine algorithms use a ranking system to index your website. Some factors involved in search engine rankings include:

• High-quality content including text and images
• Bounce rates (number of people who instantly leave your website)
• Ease of website navigation
• Websites free from errors or duplicates
• Keywords from the search
• Number of links to and from the website
• Geographic specifications

While there are many more complicated factors that make up search engine algorithms, the point is that these algorithms rank certain websites higher than others based on factors that you can control.

So, in terms of SEO for startups, the overall goal of optimisation is to make sure that your website has the best possible chances of ranking higher on SERPs.

It’s important to also note that SEO isn’t necessarily about tricking the algorithm or doing anything scammy to get more visibility. After all, these algorithms are extremely sophisticated and it’d be pretty hard to fool them these days.

Instead, the idea behind high-quality SEO for startups is to offer your website users as much value as possible. In other words, if your website doesn’t offer any value to your users, it’s unlikely that SEO will do much good…

But once you know that you have something valuable to share, you can also optimise your website to boost visibility and solve your customers problems based on what they’re actually searching on search engines.

SEO for Startups: Why is it important?

SEO for startups is essential because, let’s face it – you likely don’t have the biggest marketing budget, right?

Since SEO focuses on boosting organic traffic to your website, this means that you’ll be able to allocate fewer funds to paid ads but still earn traffic from motivated leads on search engines.

Again, for SEO to work, you need to add value to your customers lives with your products and services and your content has to be well-written. In other words, all the SEO in the world can’t solve a bad product or poor communication.

Instead, SEO for startups is important because you’ll become more visible to more people. After all, Google gets 3.5 billion search every single day.

If you’re not optimising your website for these search engines, you’re missing the opportunity to find new customers who are actively trying to find a solution to their problem. If your product or service can solve their problem, you definitely want them to find you.

SEO for startups is the way to do that.

How to Do SEO for Startups

So, how exactly should you go about actually doing SEO for startups? Let’s go step by step and see what you can start with if you’re an SEO beginner.

Set clear SEO goals

At the end of the day, you can’t reach a goal unless you set a goal. So, the same goes for SEO for startups.

Set clear SEO goals before you even start working on your strategy but make sure they’re measurable and realistic at the same time.

Your SEO goals will change depending on the type of startup you’re running.

• If your business generates revenue through online ads, it makes sense that you’d want to increase your organic search traffic.
• If you’re hoping to reach a local audience, your SEO strategy might focus on “near me” searches
• If you have expertise in a specific field even if your product or service doesn’t directly relate, you might even aim to build some brand authority for business advice, startup tips and tricks, or other content that people are searching for.

Keep track of the data

Next, you’ll want to set up some reporting protocols so that you can measure your progress. This includes setting up:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Keyword Tracking Tools
• Marketing Funnel Tracking

In terms of SEO for startups, you won’t have to go all-in at this stage. Chances are you’re starting out with a basic website and only a few sales funnels in place.

Still, it’s important to make sure you’re keeping track of the data from the very start. These tools can help you understand:

• Which pages on your website are the most popular
• Your bounce rate (meaning how many people leave your website instantly)
• Where your traffic is coming from
• Audience demographics
• Page load times

Truth be told, current analytics tools are extremely sophisticated and can tell you more information than you could ever imagine about the way users interact with your website. While not all of it is important, a good chunk of this data is key to improving SEO for startups.

Not to mention, keeping track of the data is essential to seeing whether or not you’ve met your SEO goals.

Fix errors and improve load times

Before you even start on an SEO content strategy, you’ll first want to go through and fix any page errors or slow load times.

Using what’s known as search engine crawlers, bots can “crawl” through your website and send you a report on all the pages in your website that need attention.

Common website errors that negatively affect SEO for startups include:

• Duplicate content
• Poor URL structure
• Broken links
• 404 pages
• Missing alt attributes
• Duplicate title tags

You’ll also want to compress any images or graphics that might be taking too long to load as this often leads to higher bounce rates as people won’t usually wait long for a page to load.

If you need help with improving your SEO for startups in terms of these more complicated technicalities, reach out to Maple Cloud SEO Agency and we’ll walk you through how we can help.

Make sure your website flows smoothly

Clunky websites with complicated navigation is another reason users might bounce off your website and try their luck with your competitors. It’s key to SEO for startups to ensure that your website flows smoothly from every angle.

Remember, not everyone finds your website’s home page. Sometimes, they find your brand through a blog post or email. This means that your website has to work no matter where a user might be coming from.

Optimising the flow of your website is known as user experience (UX) and some of the most common UX issues that can negatively affect SEO for startups includes:

• Poor navigation
• Incompatibility with mobile
• Broken links
• Circular links (links leading users in circles)

You can measure the UX design of your website using Google Analytics and its funnel feature. It’ll show you where exactly users are dropping off in any given funnel whether it’s at checkout, on the homepage or at any stage of a landing page flow.

Complete relevant keyword research

Keyword research is an essential component when doing SEO for startups. This is where you’ll come up with topic ideas for key terms that you’re hoping to rank for on SERPs.

The one thing to remember with keyword research, however, is that they should always be relevant to your brand, products or expertise.

It’s tempting to aim to rank for trending keywords or keywords that have huge search volumes. For example, during the pandemic, many startups who don’t fully understand SEO could fall into the trap of trying to rank for terms like ‘COVID-19’, ‘coronavirus’ or ‘Omicron’.

But, if your website does end up ranking at the top of the SERPs for these keywords, it won’t be for long. The reason is that your startup probably doesn’t actually solve the search query for that keyword and users will bounce off your website, lowering your ranking.

Therefore, relevancy is key.

When doing SEO for startups, you should aim to rank for keywords with high search volumes and low competition scores. You’ll have a better chance of ranking for these keywords since lots of people are searching for them and not a lot of others are currently ranking for it.

Create an SEO content strategy

Now that you’ve got your goals in place, the analytics set up and your relevant keywords down pat, it’s time to build your SEO content strategy.

Your SEO content refers to every written word and piece of metadata that live within each page of your website. So, while the most obvious aspects of SEO content includes blog posts, sales pages, landing pages and product descriptions, everything on the backend matters as well.

In other words, SEO for startups requires optimisation of all your content including:

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• H1, H2, H3 tags
• Body copy
• URL structure
• Alt text
• Image filenames

There are also things you can do to optimise your SEO content even more. Characteristics of your content such as inbound and outbound hyperlinks, length and structure also contribute to your SEO rankings.

SEO content should also include interactive, high-quality images or videos and, of course, your target keywords throughout.

Not to mention, well-written content is absolutely necessary if you want to do a good job with SEO for startups. The content needs to be error-free and answer the relevant search query completely.

Build backlinks

Backlinks are another important aspect of strong SEO for startups. Backlinks refer to the links that point to your website from outside of your domain.

Keep in mind that you should never do anything scammy for backlinks. Only white hat tactics for acquiring backlinks will be able to help your SERP rankings.

A few ways you can build backlinks include:

• Including your company link on the personal website of the CEO and elsewhere where it makes sense to link your brand
• Find relevant directories and add your company details
• Search for round-up articles and request your company be added
• Do interviews and get influencers involved in supporting your brand
• Write guest posts on forums and places like Medium

Skip the cold emails as they’re usually a waste of time and build backlinks in an organic, effective way to boost SEO for startups.

Stay up to date on SEO for startups

Last but not least, it’s essential that you stay up to date on SEO for startups. Search engine algorithms are changing all the time. So, everything you learn about SEO is always subject to change.

Plus, with new technologies emerging every day, there’s a chance that the way people search for products and services will change in the coming years. In short, it’s important to learn about what’s next for SEO and how you can stay prepared for what’s on the horizon.

SEO for startups requires a constant will to learn. And with that, it makes sense that as the owner of a startup, you might not want to do it all yourself.

In that case, Maple Cloud SEO is here for you. Book a free consultation with our SEO experts today. We have experience doing SEO for startups and we’ll help you build a strategy that’s right for your business.

Best Tools to Get Started with SEO for Startups

There’s no need to do all your SEO alone. Here, we’re going over some of the best SEO tools to help you.

SEO Audit Tools

To see where your website currently stands in terms of SEO, you can use SEO audit tools. This is your best place to start before you even attempt to implement a new strategy for your SEO for startups.

These tools can give you detailed reports about your current rankings on SERPs for a variety of different search engines and show you which keywords are working best for your website.

Some of the top SEO audit tools available include:

• SEMRush
• Seomater
• Google Search Console
• SEOquake

While reporting tools like Google Analytics (which we’ll get into later) are better for regular check ups, audits are usually best done on a less frequent basis. Still, if you’re a beginner to SEO for startups, you don’t want to overlook an audit.

Keyword Research Tools

It’s one thing to incorporate keywords into your website content in order to rank higher in SERPs for those keywords. But, how do you go about actually finding relevant keywords to use for your SEO for startups?

The truth is, it takes a bit of creativity. However, the best place to start usually is by searching your niche or industry and finding topics from there.

So, if you’re a startup that provides users with remote work management solutions, you might start your keyword research by searching ‘remote work’, ‘working from home’ or ‘remote teams’.

The tools you’ll use for keyword research are structured to help you come up with other ideas surrounding those keywords and from there, you’re bound to have countless ideas that are related to your product or service.

Some of the top keyword research tools on the market include:

• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• KWFinder

Once you have an ongoing list of keywords, you can build your content strategy around those keywords and start writing blog posts and articles that will help your content rank higher on Google and boost SEO for startups.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of your most powerful tools when working on SEO for startups. In fact, Google Analytics offers so much valuable information that it quickly becomes a bit overwhelming at first.

Since Google Analytics tells you everything from where your traffic is coming from, how many people are currently on your site and which pages see the least amount of traffic, there’s no question that linking your website to Google Analytics is a must.

Some startups find that checking Google Analytics weekly offers a good idea of what’s working and what still needs adjustments. However, it’s important to remember that SEO for startups can take months before you start seeing real results.

So, as much as keeping your eye on Google Analytics is important, it’s always essential to remain patient throughout the process.

SEO Agencies

Arguably the most powerful tool in any startup’s toolbox is a high-quality SEO agency. So, what does an SEO agency do and why should startups use them as a tool?

SEO agencies are full-service teams that work on SEO for startups, big businesses and individuals alike. They’re experts in all things SEO and content marketing and can do it all so that you can focus on running your business.

Again, since high-quality content and offering real value to your customers is really the best way to optimise your website for search engines, SEO agencies can help you with:

• High-quality content writing
• On-site optimisation
• White hat backlink creation
• Relevant keyword research
• Content strategies

So, if all of this SEO stuff feels just a tad too overwhelming, not to worry! An SEO agency can help.

Book a free consultation with Maple Cloud SEO Agency today. We have experience doing SEO for startups and we’re excited to help you on your journey to better SEO once and for all.