Are you looking for effective SEO tips for startups? If so, you´re in the right place.
First things first, congratulations on launching your new website.
You already took the hardest step: getting started.
Now it’s time to use SEO tips for startups to create a strong online brand by getting your website to appear on relevant search results and attract the right visitors.
But you’re probably wondering: With billions of websites on the internet, how can I get my website seen by the right people?
The good news is that you’re not competing with every existing website, only those related to your niche.
Creating a strong online brand is a marathon, not a sprint. We’ll help you take the first critical steps with these 5 SEO tips for startups.
5 SEO Tips for Startups to Create Websites that Rank High
Consider implementing these easy and effective SEO tips for startups to grow their business.
1. Check If Your Website Has Been Indexed
Learning whether your site is indexed is one of the most important SEO tips for startups, especially when the website is new.
The reason is simple.
If you want people to find your startup’s website, it needs to show up on search engines. And this can only happen if search engines crawl your website and index it.
What does ‘crawling’ mean?
Search engine web crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, rapidly move from page to page on the internet, reading the content to understand what it’s about.
Web crawling aims to find all the web pages available on the internet and index them based on their content.
It makes it easier for search engines to provide relevant results whenever a user conducts a search.
To check if your website has been indexed by Google, search “site:” followed by your domain’s URL. site:https://www.example.com/
Let’s check Amazon’s domain, for instance.
Image via Google
The results show Google has indexed 114 million pages of the giant eCommerce website.
No results will show if Google hasn’t indexed your website. New pages on your website that bots haven’t crawled yet won’t show up either.
How do you get Google to crawl your website?
Submit the web domain you want to be indexed onto the Google Search Console.
Image via Google Search Console
You can only submit a web domain you own or manage. You’ll have to verify domain ownership before proceeding.
Image via Google Search Console
Once you’ve verified that the website is yours, Choose the property and select the URL Inspector tool. Paste your URL and click “Request Indexing”.
The tool will inspect if there are any indexing issues with your URL. If there are none, the site will be queued for indexing.
It can take a few days or a week for Google to crawl your website.
This is one of the basic SEO tips for startups that you must use as soon as you launch your website.
Want more useful SEO tips for startups?
Keep reading to find more such SEO tips for startups.
2. Optimize Your Site’s Loading Speed
Fast page speed is also one of the critical SEO tips for startups.
It helps you rank higher on search engines and improves your visitors’ experience on your website.
Slow-loading websites turn away potential customers.
And the more time it takes to load, the more likely visitors will close the window.
Google provides a free tool you can use to assess the speed of your pages. It’s called PageSpeed Insights.
It assesses the speed on both desktop and mobile devices. It’ll also provide suggestions on how you can improve the speed.
We analyzed a page from Amazon to see its performance.
Here are the results:
Image via PageSpeed Insights
And here are the suggestions for improvement.
Need some SEO tips for startups to improve the speed of your website?
Here are some page speed optimization tips to get you started:
- Get rid of the extras slowing down your site. Remove excess plugins, irrelevant widgets, and other unnecessary add-ons.
- Optimize your images. Reduce the size of your images without interfering with quality. You can use a free tool like Kraken.io to optimize your images.
- Avoid too many ads on the website. You can use the lazy loading technique to display ads only when the user can view them. For WordPress version v5.4 and above it is a built-in feature. For other platforms, you can use plugins.
- Ensure your hosting provider is performance-focused. Use a dedicated hosting plan where you won’t have to share the server resources with other sites.
- Use caching to store temporary data and fetch it quickly when a user loads a page. Most CMS systems provide a plugin to do this.
- Reduce your JS, CSS, and HTML code to include only essential elements. Remove unnecessary spaces, comments, new lines, etc. to minify your site code.
3. Write In-Depth Content
Google is committed to enriching the experience of every user looking for information. This means providing valuable information through search results that meet their search intent.
For this reason, one of the most valuable SEO tips for startups that want to get on Google’s good side is to write insightful and in-depth content consistently.
Rich content establishes you as an industry expert and builds your authority in your niche. It’s also a magnet for high-quality backlinks.
When your article receives backlinks from high authority websites, search engines see the backlinks as a ‘vote of confidence’ from the other websites.
Google perceives you as a trusted source of valuable information and ranks your content higher.
Be sure to write SEO-friendly content that meets search intent.
To find the search intent of a keyword, search for it on Google and read the content that’s ranking on the first page of SERP.
Google deems these results relevant to the search intent of the keyword. The search intent can be informational, transactional, navigational, or commercial (comparing various products).
Here are some other SEO tips for startups you can use when creating content:
- Use an attention-grabbing title that evokes curiosity in a reader and encourages them to click on your search result. Ask a question, share a shocking fact, or use numbers to add credibility to your content.
- Write an introduction that not only gives a sneak peek into what the reader can expect from the article, but immediately holds their attention. You can do that by sharing a brief interesting story, taking a controversial but relevant stance on a topic, or talking about a challenge that your audience will relate to.
- Make your content easily digestible. Break it into sections using subheadings. Use bullet points and lists to make the content scannable and easy to read.
- Illustrate points using screenshots, images, videos, and infographics. They make the content visually interesting and informative.
- Ensure that it has a logical flow. Help readers move smoothly from one sentence to the next. Use transition words to connect sentences and paragraphs. Avoid jumping between ideas.
- Use simple language and short uncomplicated sentences. Your content shouldn’t read like an academic paper.
Posting engaging and unique content regularly is one of the SEO tips for startups that provide long-term benefits.
4. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
You probably know that keywords are important for SERP rankings and getting your content in front of the right audience.
There are three types of keywords by length:
- Short-tail keywords (head keywords)
- Mid-tail keywords
- Long-tail keywords
Image via Seobility
Short-tail keywords are broad search terms.
They are popular and have a high search volume. They’re also the most competitive keywords to rank for. An example is dog food.
Mid-tail keywords are slightly longer and more descriptive than short-tail keywords.
They are also less competitive and have a lower search volume than short-tail keywords. An example is affordable dog food.
Long-tail keywords are the longest keywords.
They are highly descriptive and target a specific audience. Though these search terms have the lowest search volume, they also have the lowest competition. An example is affordable dog food for a French Bulldog.
Since these are SEO tips for startups, we’ll talk about long-tail keywords.
As a startup, you don’t want to compete with the big players in your niche yet. There’ll be less competition if you target long-tail keywords.
Start by finding the short-tail keywords that are getting the highest search volume. Use these broad search terms to guide you on topics that your target audience cares about.
From these topics, use keyword research tools to find relevant long-tail keywords that you can target in your content.
Also, you can use CRM solutions to manage your keywords related to customer service, sales strategy, and lead generation. You can check with your CRM while finalizing your keywords in a quick and effective way.
Using long-tail keywords comes with a number of benefits like:
- You’ll rank faster due to lower competition. This means more exposure for your website.
- Although you’ll get a small amount of traffic, it’ll be more targeted. You’ll attract readers who are looking for a solution to a specific problem. With the right lead generation tool, you can get some high-quality leads that are likely to turn into customers.
- Long-tail keywords are more descriptive, making it easier to meet the search intent. Meeting search intent means more dwell time, which signals to Google that your content is worth ranking.
If you have audio and video content, transcribe it so that bots can crawl and index the text. You can optimize the transcription with long-tail keywords as well to increase your opportunities for ranking.
Monitoring and tracking the performance of your keywords in the SERPs is a crucial element and in this process, a good Google keyword rank tracker such as Zutrix can help to know the real ranking of your keywords.
5. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Are you wondering why having a mobile-friendly website is among the top SEO tips for startups?
Simply because most people use mobile devices to search the web.
According to Statista, over 60% of organic searches in the US are from mobile devices.
Image via Statista
Given that a large chunk of Google searches come from mobile devices, websites that work well on both mobile and desktop devices show up higher on SERPs.
Here are some SEO tips for startups to create mobile-friendly websites:
- Choose the right eCommerce platform that provides a responsive design. A responsive website builder like Wix or a good CMS like WordPress will help you create a website that responds to the device through which it's accessed.
- The website design should be ‘thumb-friendly’. Make elements on your site like CTA buttons large. It’ll make it easy for mobile users to click on these easily.
- Make your site easy to navigate. Have a simple and clear site menu that directs users to what they’re looking for. Add a drop-down menu at the top of your homepage with a clear hierarchy of pages with categories and subcategories.
- Make your CTAs (calls-to-action) easy to spot. You can review different Call to action examples to know the right CTA method. Keep some white space around the CTA button, use bright colors, and use a large font to make it stand out.
- Use online image optimizer tools to keep your image size low. This will allow pages to load quickly on mobile devices.
- The fonts should be readable on mobile devices. For body fonts,16pxis the most legible.
- Use the right form builder tools to create a form for your website to get desired data.
Google has provided an in-depth guide on how you can make your site more mobile-friendly.
Google also provides a free tool that you can use to test the mobile-friendliness of your website.
Image via Google
Testing your website regularly is one of the SEO tips for startups that you should follow.
Time to Put These SEO Tips for Startups into Action
While these are some quick SEO tips for startups to increase their chances of ranking on SERPs, there is plenty that goes into keeping your website optimized for search engines.
- You need to constantly ensure that search engines crawl the new pages you create.
- Develop a robust backlink strategy.
- Create fresh content on a regular schedule.
- Keep doing keyword research and updating your content.
You can monitor your website more easily by using online SEO software like Zutrix. It’ll carry out an in-depth analysis of your site so that you can keep improving it.
