Increase Your Startup’s Customer Growth Using SEO

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Growing your customer base is one of the major challenges for every startup. If no one has heard of you or your product, how can you expect them to convert?

Fortunately, digital marketing offers plenty of growth opportunities for startups. With a little bit of research and planning, you can leverage SEO to grow your online presence as well as your conversion rates.

Understand User Intent

Your first order of business is to understand what your customers are looking for and how. Ideally, you will have done some extensive market research well before you launched the startup.

In SEO terms, search intent translates to “what does this person expect to see when they type in so and so into their search bar.” For example, if someone is looking for “Uber vs. Bolt,” they likely want to learn more about the two apps. If they are looking for “download Bolt,” they most definitely don’t want to learn more about the product.

By optimizing your pages for user intent, you can serve customers what they want in the format they want it in, boosting your chance of converting them.

Choose Keywords Carefully

Once you understand what your audience is looking for, you can take the steps required to appear when they use Google (or any other search engine). This is when keyword research comes into play.

A mistake a lot of startups make is believing they already have all the right keywords in place. However, while you may be using certain terms or believe your audience is looking for a solution using specific words, you could turn out to be completely wrong.

Also, if you were to target a high-volume keyword, like “productivity app,” you’d quickly find it quite impossible to rank at the top. If you were to find a low-volume but high-potential keyword, on the other hand, like “best productivity planners,” you could achieve much better results.

Build Authority with Backlinks

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In the SEO world, backlinks are a very important ranking signal. Your website needs to build quality, authority backlinks from reputable, relevant websites that will tell search engines that you are a trustworthy source and a brand that deserves high rankings.

The pitfall when it comes to backlinks is that the internet is full of agencies and individuals who offer them at various prices but often sell you nothing more than worthless backlinks from questionable websites.

In order to ensure your backlink portfolio isn’t tainted, you need to find the best link building services. They won’t offer one-size-fits-all packages, they will only do white-hat link building, and they will understand how to tailor their approach to your specific needs.

Get Featured by the Right Channels

Alongside a link building campaign, you also need to make an effort to be featured by the right news outlets and other channels that are frequented and trusted by your target audience.

There will be some PR involved, yes, and you will need to send out releases to various mainstream and niche news outlets. But you also need to find a way to get mentioned by industry influencers, get featured on podcasts or YouTube channels, and generally shouted out by the people your audience trusts.

This will both help boost the SEO value of your website and allow you to make valuable connections you can leverage in different ways. Also, note that there is no blueprint for this step and that you will need to tailor it to your brand and audience.

Put Mobile First

Mobile-first indexing has been a thing for ages. And with more than half of all search traffic coming from mobile devices, you need to ensure that your mobile pages are as perfect as they can be.

This will mean going beyond creating just a responsive website. You need to ensure that:

• the CTAs are properly placed
• your pages load super fast
• there are no layout shifts
• each element has its proper place

Think of your mobile website as completely separate from your desktop version. Of course, you’ll want to stay on brand and make the two versions cohesive. But, instead of considering how you might be able to translate what works on desktop to a smaller, differently oriented screen, you’ll need to keep the needs of your mobile audience in mind above all else.

Adopt an Integrated Approach

Finally, don’t forget that SEO is just a part of a larger, more integrated, and comprehensive digital marketing approach. Don’t just focus on optimizing your website. Instead, give the same amount of attention to all of your other digital channels as well.

This will mean optimizing your email campaigns and your social media channels and ensuring that you promote the efforts you’re making on one channel across all your other outlets.

Don’t expect to merely write good content that fits someone’s search intent and use the right keywords. That is no longer enough. Consistency and promotion matter in SEO, so get ready to be loud and omnipresent if you hope to grow your customer base.

Wrapping Up

Using SEO can be an incredible way to boost customer interest and grow your conversions. However, bear in mind that SEO is no longer about keyword stuffing and some technical mumbo-jumbo. It requires an integrated approach along with a decent amount of technical and content writing knowledge. And, above all else, it requires patience.