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SEO for Startups: How to Use SEO to Energize Your Organic Traffic in the First Year

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SEO for Startups

Image by Diggity Marketing from Pixabay

Marketing is a key component of any business, but startups need to leverage marketing even more to establish a presence and get products or services in front of an audience. Without it, a startup may never make it past the first year.

Organic traffic is an important part of brand awareness and conversions. The search engine results page is where most organic traffic comes from, usually when a user searches for something and clicks on a link.

Most users click on the top links on the first page, which is why ranking near the top of the search results is vital to generating traffic for your website. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of ranking on the page, and we’re here to give you all the best practices for leveraging SEO for your startup in the first year.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a tactic to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your website from the search engine results page. Unlike paid traffic, which puts your website in front of an audience with ads, SEO is designed to target organic traffic through blogs, videos, web copy, and other content.

Benefits of SEO for Startups

SEO is vital to brand awareness and growth, so startups need an effective SEO strategy from the beginning. Check out the benefits of SEO for startups:

Cost-Effective

Budgets can be tight for startups, especially when it comes to marketing. SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy that can drive traffic with little spend, though it takes time and patience. By creating content that ranks high on search engine results pages, you can direct traffic to your website for lower costs than paid traffic.

Brand Awareness and Growth

Ranking high on search engine results pages gains attention for your brand and attracts prospective customers. Many customers discover new brands while searching for unrelated things. Zutobi uses this first hand where we are trying to get as much exposure when searchers are looking for driver’s guides. We optimize and focus heavily on ranking the site for driving searches with one of our most popular pieces being a Florida DMV practice test. This test is heavily searched in a heavily populated state. Once users find our practice tests, they then begin to interact with our brand and content much more!

Brand Authority

When your content earns a top-ranked spot on a search engine, users trust it more. Search engines can be particular about ranking content that’s questionable. If you have a high ranking, users believe that your brand is an industry authority.

Improved User Experience

User experience is an important part of gaining loyal customers. Users pay attention to aspects of your site, such as the load times, navigation, and ease of use. Some aspects of SEO, such as making your site mobile friendly and fixing broken links, contribute to user experience.

SEO for Startups how to use SEO

Image by Diego Velázquez from Pixabay

Leverage SEO for Your Startup

Take a look at these tips for leveraging SEO for your startup:

Opt for Low-Hanging Keywords

The “low-hanging fruit” means the easiest to get. Low-hanging keywords are similar in that they’re keywords that already earned a high ranking on search engines and don’t have fierce competition. While these keywords alone won’t earn you a top spot, including them can help you get on the first few pages.

Define Your Ideal Audience

Marketing your content to a broad audience will lead to a lot of clicks and traffic, but not quality traffic. You want to target your ideal audience, as in the people most likely to use your product or service, for high-quality traffic and the opportunity to turn traffic into customers.

You can define your audience by thinking about these questions:

  • What are my customer’s pain points?
  • How does my product or service solve them?
  • What are my ideal customer’s demographics?
  • What type of content offers relevance and value to my ideal customer?

If you need more insights, research the keywords that are most likely to be used by your customers. Longtail keywords, which are key phrases, are excellent for SEO.

For example, we create tons of driver guides and helpful content for the Zutobi app to draw attention to our driver courses. So part of our strategy is to optimize for keyword phrases like “practice permit test for Missouri” or “how to pass a road test” to promote our site and driving content.

Post Relevant, Authoritative Content

Establishing your brand as an industry authority is important for any business, but especially startups. This is your chance to make a great impression and set yourself apart from your rivals. Focus on the topics you know best for your content and keep it relevant to your business and your customers’ pain points. Search engines rank content that performs well.

Long-form blog posts and articles are among the best types of content for SEO. You can add relevant, digestible features like infographics, embedded videos, screenshots, and bullets to enhance your content further.

Think Long-Term

SEO can be a long and patient process, but it pays off in high-quality organic traffic. Once you implement an SEO strategy, prepare to evaluate and refine it along the way to earn the best possible ranking. You’ll likely be rewarded with tons of organic traffic, loyal, repeat customers, and conversions.

Keep it Consistent

Managing a startup means wearing a lot of hats, which can make adding an SEO strategy daunting. Consistency is crucial to SEO, however, so include SEO into your scheduling to make sure it isn’t forgotten. If you can’t manage a lot of content at first, focus on quality and not quantity. Post well-crafted, consistent content, even if it’s only a few times a month.

Generate Organic Traffic with SEO

As long as we use search engines to browse the internet, SEO will be a staple of any business strategy. With these SEO tips, you can refine your content to earn a high ranking from a search engine and drive quality traffic to your website for current and future awareness and growth.

Tim Waldenback is the co-founder of Zutobi Drivers Ed, a gamified e-learning platform focused on online drivers education to help teens get their license. Tim founded Zutobi to make world-class driver's education fun, affordable, and easily accessible for all.

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