A startup website is a blank canvas or a clean slate. It provides the perfect opportunity for an internet marketer to shine through. There is a chance to choose search engine optimization as your marketing strategy and use SEO for startups to propel your business forward.

SEO goals for your startup website can be one of the most important things that push your business in the right direction. Improving your search engine rankings can be the deciding factor between a thriving startup business and one that fails.

Improving your organic search engine results is not an easy task – unfortunately, there is no formula that will magically push you to the top of the search results. There are, however, some basic “keys” to search engine optimization (SEO) that you can use to help improve your search engine rankings, like keyword research, link building, technical SEO, and so on.

And also, there are automated SEO tools like Ninja Reports that help to handle all these processes in one place. In this guide, you’ll find useful advice for achieving top rankings for your startup website without breaking the bank.

Why Is SEO Success Important For Startups?

Startups are defined as businesses that are within the formative stages. That pretty much means that they’re not fully functional. It’s the time when companies have a product but aren’t exactly in their prime. It could be anything from a tech startup with its revolutionary idea to an eCommerce startup with its SEO business plan.

Either way, these startups are going to need SEO, and it’s important that you know why. Doing SEO in the early days of a business will be more successful than doing so once it’s already launched and established. It’s easy to see why startups should care about SEO: 

1. First, they want to be found because they want to attract potential leads who could turn into customers; 
2. Second, their competitors are already on the web, and if you don’t optimize your website or blog, you are losing market share as well as organic visibility.

If you’re a small company or just starting out, search engine optimization can provide you with an edge over your competitors. Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that allows startups to gain free organic exposure and traffic for their business. Your startup will have difficulty reaching its target audience without a proper SEO strategy. 

5 Steps To Improve Website SEO For Startups

1. Create A User-Friendly Website

Although Google is primarily concerned with ranking the most relevant content on the web, it still wants to provide the best experience possible to its users. According to the SEO pros at JSB Digital Works, good SEO and user experience go hand-in-hand.

Visitors should be able to easily find information about your company and products on any page of your site by using navigational elements.

It’s important to do usability testing on your website regularly to find out where users misunderstand or get confused while they’re on your site. This can provide valuable insights into how you structure your information architecture and improve the overall user experience. 

A good website design is the first thing that your visitors notice. But if users find the site slow to load — they might just leave. This can be especially true for mobile users who often have smaller screens and slower download speeds. So you need a user-friendly site that performs well across different devices and browsers. A slow site won’t keep users engaged enough to stay on your site that long.

2. Do Keyword Research

Keyword research should be the foundation of any search engine optimization campaign, but it’s also useful for any form of marketing in general. Keywords can describe your business or the products and services it offers in a way that makes it easier for potential customers to find you. Using the wrong target keyword can be a huge mistake.

To find out which words and phrases your audience is typing into Google that bring visitors to your website, you need to first conduct keyword research. Selecting the right keywords for your product or service enables you to bring in new customers who are likely to convert into paying clients. 

If you have a relatively new website, you can use Google Keyword Planner. It is a useful tool for coming up with new keyword ideas and determining which ones are worth targeting. The tool estimates search volume and competition level for related keywords, both of which can be helpful tools in identifying keywords that you want to go after.

This doesn’t mean you should only choose keywords with thousands of searches every month. Instead, use the keyword planner to find long-tail keywords with lower competition levels while still relevant to your niche.

This means that instead of targeting “email marketing software”, you would target “best email marketing software reviews”. This will give you more traffic without the need to bid on competitive keywords that everyone is fighting over. 

3. Create Content (build content clusters based on keyword research)

Content clusters can be utilized to dissect an extensive topic, such as “content marketing” or even “startup SEO,” into an easily digestible format. Organizing pages by main points and subtopics can cover every aspect of a topic, making your site more comprehensive and persuasive to your audience.

Moreover, by using the data gathered from your keyword research, you can make it possible for your website to be found by users on SERPs more frequently. When your landing page draws the user’s attention, it must be compelling enough to convince them to continue reading through.

Stats and diagrams will capture their attention, visuals and lists provide ease of reading; compile necessary info and provide links to another page, and intrigue them with questions that only their curiosity can answer.

While automation is encouraged to scale quality content creation and distribution, not all use of automation is created equal. Some types of content must still be created by humans because creating that content requires a level of expertise or contextual understanding that isn’t yet possible to be done with machines alone.

Using AI that generates content to manipulate ranking in search results violates Google’s spam policies. Google strives to protect users from low-quality content, which can frustrate users, mislead them, or result in similar review manipulation. 

4. Optimize Web Page Elements (on-page SEO)

With the prevalence of online businesses, your web pages need to be designed with potential customers’ needs in mind. They should be created in a way that will give your leads and customers the best experience possible.

Each page of your website must be carefully analyzed with regard to its elements. This doesn’t mean that you should clutter your webpage with too many specific keywords, but it means you need to ensure that each page is fully optimized with the correct types of title tags and meta descriptions. 

• The on-page optimization of a web page itself is the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and involves modifying the website content, HTML coding, and elements such as titles, description tags, headers, and images.

You also need to consider whether each page has enough internal links and whether you are using the right types of anchor text in these links. For each page on your site, it’s also important to make sure that you have an XML sitemap in place. Another good way to optimize on-page SEO is to make sure you split up longer paragraphs into shorter ones.

Making adjustments to your on-page SEO elements can have a huge impact on how your web pages are seen by search engines and visitors alike. It focuses on getting the website set up in a way that search engines can read and index it properly for maximum visibility.

You can use the SE Ranking on-page SEO checker to analyze why your pages aren’t ranking high and fix all the existing issues based on their importance and urgency.

5. Build Backlinks 

Growing your search rankings and gaining visibility takes hard work and an understanding of how search engines work. Building links is one of the best ways to increase your rankings and enhance your website’s trustworthiness. 

• Link building is the process of acquiring links for a website through various methods to improve that site’s ranking in the “organic” or “natural” search engine result listings on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. 

The process may involve multiple techniques like content marketing or guest blogs. It’s a strategy where you find sites that link to related content, and you get them to link to your content, hopefully with a return of increasing your SEO efforts.

A link has three main parts: The anchor text (the text that links to your website), the link’s destination (the URL that you want to build a backlink to), and the link profile of the linking site.

It is necessary to create relevant and high-quality links in relation to your business if you want to achieve higher rankings in search engine results pages. It could take months to find the right partners to add value to your site. 

Conclusion

There’s a myth that you need a large budget as an entrepreneur to perform organic SEO for SaaS startups. SEO is a great strategy for startups because it does not always require large budgets to see organic traffic growth. And once your site grows and generates revenue, the traffic will continue coming.

SEO tactics and techniques take time, persistence, insight, and knowledge to come to fruition finally. But SEO is a long-term investment. If done correctly, your efforts will pay off in the long run.

You may not see results overnight, but it keeps improving once you start rolling in the right direction. There are no shortcuts in SEO, but you can make significant progress much faster if you know what you’re doing with our ultimate SEO tips.