seo for startups

How Can SEO Be Helpful for Startups in 2024?

Being a startup, thus far, you might have realized how important it is to be present online. Whether you are planning to sell online, offer tech solutions, or whatever, your customer base, whether they are businesses or individuals, are searching for these products/services online. So, how do you make sure you are being seen online by your target audience? The answer is SEO. Irrespective of who you want to compete with or on what scale you are going to operate, this marketing method can make you stand tall among your competition.

In this blogpost we are going to talk about what is SEO, how it helps startup businesses like yours and how you can use it to boost your brand awareness and sales.

Why do Startups Need SEO?

why do startups need seo

SEO is a really useful tool for startup businesses, achieving organic traction at relatively low costs and with long-term benefits.

To understand this better, let’s first understand what’s SEO, and how it works.

SEO is the practice of improving your website’s core elements to increase its visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

How it works?

Your website ranks on search engines based on how their bots can crawl (search engine’s discovery process which explores new and updated content such as a webpage, an image, a PDF, a video, etc. and assesses its relevancy and value) and index (the process by which search engines organize information to provide users with a super fast response for their queries) it.

SEO, which looks into on-page, off-page, and some technical aspects of your websites, aims to improve them so that it’s easy for search engines to understand the structure of your website, measure its relevancy based on user signals, and rank it based on all these aspects.

So, basically, if you are a restaurant startup and want someone looking for a dining experience online to find your website ranking in the top results, you need SEO for your restaurant business.

Benefits: SEO for Startups

benefits seo for startups

  • By focusing on SEO, you can take your businesses online presence and brand recognition.
  • SEO can help you compete with well-established competitors in your niche.
  • It builds your trustworthiness and credibility among users and signals them you are authentic.
  • It is the most cost-effective and sustainable way to nurture leads and scale your business.
  • You can track your SEO performance easily.
  • Improves website performance and accessibility, eventually boosting user experience.

What do studies say?

A study by First page Sage revealed that Customer Acquisition costs from the organic channel are almost 42.8% cheaper than inorganic CAC in all industries.

According to Search Engine Journal, 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any marketing channel.

Data emphasizing the importance of SEO for businesses across various industries:

61% of B2B marketers agree that SEO and organic traffic can generate more leads than any other marketing channel. (Hubspot)
60% of shopping occasions begin online. (Google)
46% of Google searches account for a local business or local service query. (Search Engine Roundtable)

Different Types of SEO for Startups

different types of seo for startups

On-Page SEO

In On page you will have to look after some on page aspects of each page of your website and optimize them for higher rankings and nurture qualified leads. Let’s take a look at what these aspects are:

  • Keywords and semantically related words
  • Search intent
  • Content quality, relevance, and value
  • Topical and Subtopical depth
  • Readability (Content)
  • Featured snippet
  • User experience (UX)
  • HTML source code & page elements
  • Schema markup
  • External and Internal linking
  • Images, videos, and infographics
  • Meta descriptions and title tag
  • URL structure

Off Page SEO

Off-page SEO focusses on improving on the aspects that lie outside the website but direct the traffic towards it. Off page SEO signals website’s trustworthness, authority and relevance to search engines.

This practice mainly focuses on creating backlinks, brands mentions and social signals. Although off page SEO is not helpful in building website’s domain authority, a low website may struggle to outrank websites with high authority. Website’s high DA reflects its credibility, and trustworthiness.

Here are some practices that can help you build domain authority:

Guest Blogging

Ask other websites to post your blogs and extend your brand exposure. This practice can help your acquire backlinks.

Online Reviews

Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your site as they act as social proof. Search engines highly value customer reviews. Plus, shoppers tends to trust your brand more when they find insightful reviews on your site.

Link Building

Link building is the process where you acquire links from other websites to you own. Having backlinks in good numbers indicates your content is highly valuable.

There are many ways to obtain backlinks. Here are some of them:

  • Find the unlinked mentions and ask them to add a link to your website.
  • Find broken links on other websites and create content for those pages, then ask webmasters to replace them with your content.
  • Write Guest blogs.
  • Check your competitor’s backlinks, create superior content and ask the websites to link with your site instead.
  • Write testimonials for your products and send them to brands to publish on their websites.
  • Create infographics to share visual data.
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Build brand awareness through social media and redirect the traffic towards your website.

Social Bookmarking

Tag your content on Reddit, Tumbler and other social forums to acquire backlinks.

Citation

Set up your Google Business Profile and list out your business in online directories.

Post on Forums and Q&A Sites

Promote your content on forums and add your site links. Communicate your user over there.

Off-page SEO can take you a lot of time, but it’s quite helpful in building your domain authority.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO includes optimizing the website’s aspects that can make crawling and indexing easy for search engine bots. These aspects mainly include fixing the website errors, loading speed, mobile responsiveness, security issues and sitemaps. When all these are performing well, it becomes easy for search engines to access the information available in your website and rank it effectively. Technical SEO can greatly impact your organic traffic, user experience, conversion rate and website speed and performance.

Here are some common technical SEO practices that ensure your website is free of any issues:

  • Running regular audits
  • Finding broken links, status code errors, redirect chains and fixing them.
  • Ensuring your website syncs well with the Core web vital principles
  • Optimzing your robot.txt.file. and XML sitemaps.
  • Securing site with HTTP and SSL certificate.
  • Constantly checking the mobile friendliness of your website.
  • Adding schema markup and hreflang
  • Finding duplicate content issues and fixing them.
  • Optimize the site’s structure.

Local SEO for Startups

If your target audience is local, Local SEO is something you cannot miss on. With the help of local SEO you can drive lot of foot traffic to your physical store. Moreover, it also helps search engine better analyze your business’s target location and audience. Resultantly, your startup can get enhanced online visibility, customers, sales and rankings.

Local SEO practices mainly include:

  • Setting up and optimizing your Google Business Profile
  • Adding your business to Google Maps
  • Creating content for a local audience
  • Targeting local keywords
  • Encouraging customers to review your site
  • Building citation
  • Building local links
  • Getting your business listed in the online directories
  • Adding all the necessary details, such as name, address and phone number to your website

International SEO

If you intend to sell your services or products globally, you will need international SEO to reach your target audience all over the world. International SEO can help you optimize your website and its content to target specific regions. With the help of International SEO, you can signal search engines that your content is relevant for the users across a wide geographic area.

Here is how you can optimize your website for an international audience:

  • Create international domains and URL structures.
  • Geotagging your Schema markup.
  • Enable translation of content into different languages
  • Include geo-targeted keyword to your content.
  • Perform international link building.
  • Adding hreflang tag.
  • Create content that targets your audience.

PPC

ppc advertising for startups

Pay per click is an advertising model where campaigner pay fee each time a user clicks their Ad. You don’t have to pay when there no clicks on your ad. PPC campaigns are highly valuable for startups as they generate high ROI and conversions. You can place your Ad on other websites, social media or search engines.

Here are some of the top benefits of PPC model:

  • You can get fast results (traffic)
  • High CTR
  • High sales and revenue
  • Display ads alongside big brands
  • Can easily show ads on the first SERP
  • High online visibility
  • Manageable budget
  • Qualified targeting based on location, keywords, device, etc.

How to track your growth?

how to track your growth

The great about SEO is you can monitor and track your performance easily. There are many SEO analytic tools available that allows you to measure, analyze, report your website’s performance. This reporting can help you gain useful insigths into how your website’s different elements are performing. Leveraging it, you can work on your shortcomings and expect better results ahead.

Here are number of things that SEO analytical reporting can help you with:

  • Get major insights on how your website is performing
  • Build actionable reporting
  • Figure out growth opportunities
  • Manage your marketing budget
  • Understand how your users interact with your website

Do You Need SEO Experts to Help You?

Now, that you have understood what SEO is and how it helps you business, one question might be itching your brain that whether you can do it all by yourself or you need an SEO expert by your side. Well, honestly SEO is a very broad marketing field which comprises many aspects that you’ll never know and understand how they work so it’s better to have a professional by your side. SEO Toronto Experts can help you get your startup well deserved recognition in your niche and unlock your full potential. We can help you with all kind of SEO services. We have served various industries across the globe. Join hands with us and watch your brand getting recognized widely and sales soaring up at all time high.

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