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Founders Guide to a Winning Startup SEO Strategy

SEO is one of the much-hyped online marketing techniques, but it’s often misunderstood. Most of the startup founders consider SEO as manipulating or tricking the search engines, but in actual SEO comprises of some core technical matters and ongoing essential actions that altogether help website pages to rank better. Constant efforts are required for successful SEO because your competitors are working constantly on their SEO to gain a competitive advantage in marketing, and there are new competitors coming every day, so it’s an ongoing battle.

A successful and result oriented SEO strategy for startups require hours of research, careful planning and fool proof actions. So, if you are a startup owner and want to make most out of Search Engine Optimization, the best time to think about it is before launching your startup. As I discussed earlier, that SEO might not be a workable option for acquiring initial customers for your startup, but it must be the part of your overall marketing plan.

Let’s look into the details on a winning SEO strategy for a startup on a limited budget, and what should be the role of startup founder in devising this strategy. Follow these steps:

Follow these steps:

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Step 1- Hiring a good SEO expert is the first, most important and the best decision. Learning SEO yourself is good, but being a startup owner you have a lot to do, so let an expert do it and you can spend your time in more productive/revenue generating tasks. Check this quick guide discussing things to consider when hiring an SEO expert or agency for your startup.

 

Step 2- On-site/in-product SEO is 80% of the total SEO, so your prime focus should be on-page SEO, i.e. your website/app. Being a founder/startup owner, it is important for you to know the basics of SEO, so you can oversee the SEO experts work. This article discusses the basic onsite SEO for a business website and this one discusses startup SEO at a glance. Here is another read on 7 SEO essentials for a startup website. Go through these and some more articles and you will be able to analyze the SEO expert’s recommendations.

 

Step 3- Give your SEO expert time to strategize and sit with him when he has recommendations ready; ask him about keyword research, titles, meta tags, content, navigation & hierarchy, URL structure, internal linking, sitemaps, duplication issues, competitor analysis, 1 month goals, 3 months goals and so on. If your product/website is covering a local market, make sure to localize your SEO strategy accordingly. If you observe that the competitor analysis is not covering enough competitors, you can guide him to speed up SEO competitive analysis.

You should also be able to use some basic tools, for instance knowing how to find the best keywords for your website SEO campaigns can help you find the missing elements from your SEO expert’s work.

 

Step 4: Trying and testing various SEO tools when you are not overloaded with other tasks is a great way to entertain yourself while learning something new and analyzing the performance of SEO campaigns that your SEO expert is running. Here are some worth trying SEO tools, i.e. you don’t need much time to use these tools, but they keep you updated with what’s going on with your website SEO.

Since it’s an ongoing battle between your startup and the competitors, you need to be consistent not just in implementing changes, but also in learning new stuff.

SEO if done rightly on a startup website can turn out to be successful lead generation medium, however, it requires a strategy, labor and patience to see the results. While you are educating yourself on constant basis, you should also give your SEO expert at least 2 hours a week specifically for learning. The more he learns, the better he will perform!

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Get the latest news, resources and tips to help you and your small business succeed.

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