Growing brand awareness, raising your profile in your industry and widening your digital footprint. These are three marketing goals that are crucial for every start-up’s growth, as new businesses face the challenge of connecting their brand and offering with potential customers and partners.
The key here is getting your SEO right, an SEO agency will help your website links to be visible, relevant and clickable every time a potential customer or partner searches for pertinent keywords online. 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority, so it’s important that you put it top of your agenda, too.
Follow these 5 SEO essentials for a better search presence, which will lead to valuable organic traffic, high-quality leads and ultimately more customers and revenue.
1.Submit your sitemap to search engines and get indexed
The most important SEO tip of all. You must let Google, Bing and any other search engines know that your website exists. Sign up for the free search-engine webmaster tools and submit your website’s sitemap. This way, Google and co will know to crawl your web pages and to return your content when people turn to search.
2.Make sure your website is mobile friendly
Google recently started to index all new websites based on their mobile experiences – an update that it is also rolling out across existing websites. This means that Google will judge you solely on how great a mobile experience your website delivers. It must feature responsive design. It must loads quickly, even on slower networks. The user interface and user experience have to be simple, intuitive and a pleasure to interact with. You can use Google’s free mobile-friendly page checker to see how your website is performing.
3.Get added to Google My Business and Bing Places
If you’re a bricks-and-mortar business or a digital business with a physical HQ, make sure your office address is listed as a business on the top search engines. This will bump up your credibility with potential customers, and gives actual customers the opportunity to review your products or services. When people search for your company, they will see legitimate business information that shows you are trustworthy. This is especially true for businesses targeting their local area.
4.Create unique and useful content
Think about your audience. Maybe you have several, each with different needs, problems and questions. Create a persona for each group and use this to inform the content you’re creating. Craft useful, engaging, unique content that is genuinely something your audience is looking for, whether it addresses their needs, solves their problems, or answers their questions. Creating content in this way will not only benefit your audience greatly, building trust and establishing you as experts, but it will also show Google that you are a website worth visiting. Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid advertising, so it is definitely worth the effort.
5.Optimise your content for search
Your fresh, engaging, super-useful new content needs to be discovered by its intended audience. Think about the keywords that are most relevant and profitable to your business – the ones you really want traffic for. Use these to build out your content, including them naturally throughout the copy and in key areas like the page title, heading tags, alt image text and meta descriptions. Make your website listing as clickable as possible, with a strong call to action, and ensure that your content is as aligned to the target keyword as is possible. Optimising your content in this way will help you to rank for the keywords that matter most.
Great SEO can be a start-up’s key to success. It can help you to reach your perfect audiences by focusing on their keywords and search intent. It will raise your brand profile and awareness, and will grow your visibility in the search engine results pages. Bigger, more established competitors will already have SEO tactics in place, so it’s important that you take these SEO essentials and get started today.