SEO for Startups: A Detailed Guide to Kick-Start Traffic For Entrepreneurs

A big challenge to any startup is to reach the potential customers. You should know who the potential customers are, where they are and how to reach them. There is another fact which is as important as the understanding of the customers; you should know who you are and where you are and also where you want to be. You should be well aware of the budget and goals to be achieved. You should make your brand familiar among the targeted customers. Create growing and quality leads. Make a higher customer loyalty.

 A good SEO Strategy will allow you to accomplish these challenges easily. When people search for a query on the search engine, they reach the most relevant content for that particular query. At the beginning stage of any startup, you will not have a good range of customers and sources but you should grow all these requirements.  

You should have an impressive website with the right amount of contents-relevant, unique, quality and useful- not too much and not too little. This website should be accessible to the search engine. The user interface should be smooth and comfortable. The users must be engaging with your contents and then perform the necessary optimization techniques to make your website rank higher. Be careful to consider the mobile friendliness also.

Obviously, everything that nourishes the success of a startup is based on the traffic and the customers. Produce great content and spread it. Know who they are and what their needs are, then think about all the ways they research a potential purchase on your site or on others. You should be familiar with the techniques and strategies that will drive more traffic to your website. Not just the high volume of the traffic is important. It should be targeted. A great range of traffic which is not targeted is worth nothing. The most effective website traffic could have some connection with your product or service or might have some interest in similar solutions. Here is a detailed guide to kick-start traffic for Entrepreneurs. 

What matters to a Startup Business?

The very important factor is to make the right choice. What you are doing must be something that you really know about and you really love – simply follow your passion. Find your interest and find the way to make it in terms of money. 

Be patient for the success to come. You may be starting your business with a small range of resources. It will take time to grow. Accept it and wait for it. 

Be aware of the competitive elements. Find the competitions for your startup and focus on the most important features. Learn and Interact with Other Businesses also. 

Make a good existence for your brand. Let it be unique and outstanding. 

Accept the risk and be focused on that. Hire the best team and contribute your best. Go ahead with the proper business plan and funding. 

Reserve the convenient budget for finding the market and other activities.

Allocate Marketing Budget Effectively

Marketing is the key factor to generate quality leads. But it doesn’t mean that most of the fund should be spent for marketing. Effective management of marketing budgets is really important. 

Determine your goals and requirements and let it be the starting point. Set a decision whether you want to make sales or generate leads or simply branding. 

Then prioritize your buyers and create a pre-plan for the budget by finding the right marketing places or channels.

Optimize the budget for these marketing strategies and have a look back to the past marketing strategies and budgets. We should Consider Expected Costs & Potential ROI of Each Platform.

Include the paid traffic within the same budget. And estimate the amount for this also. 

Track and analyze your outcomes and results based on these strategies and budgets. And perform the optimization according to it. 

One brilliant idea is to peep into your competitor’s strategies and marketing techniques. It doesn’t mean copying exactly what they execute, but to be inspired by those ideas.  

Although creating and implementing innovative and new ideas is always appreciated. 

Allocating marketing budgets effectively means, determining the total fund to be utilized for marketing, finding the marketing platforms for promoting the business, dividing the total budget for each strategy effectively, reviewing and analyzing the results and performing the required actions according to the outcomes.

Actionable Steps to Drive Traffic to your website

For any action to be performed for driving traffic to your website, we must have a strong understanding of Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. Analyzing these factors, known as SWOT Research or SWOT Analysis is equally important for both a startup and an existing business. 

To know more about how you can get qualified traffic without paying extra money click on the video below.

Strength: Here we should consider the advantages your business has over other businesses, which are obviously internal. 

Weaknesses: It is important to consider your organization’s weaknesses just like the strengths. Thereby you can examine how and why your competitors are doing better than you. Analyzing such factors will make you aware of the weaknesses and the processes that need to be improved. 

Opportunities: The external possibilities that help your business to grow. Consider the market growth and find the new factors and changes that will make your business even more successful. Make a great importance for your customers, both the existing and new customers. 

Threats: In fact we do not have much more control over the threats. These will negatively impact your business and success. We should find and resolve these threats before your business becomes a victim. These threats could be a competitor who steals your customers, the unavailability of required resources, the technology updates or even the carelessness of your internal team. 

Create Content Marketing Strategy

• Keep in mind that Content is the king. It is important to create great and unique content. Then find the perfect strategies for its marketing. 
• Create a well-defined goal. And be organized with your goals. Then we should create more targeted landing pages.
• Measure the range of the market to identify your audience. Not only the audience, find out their needs also. Then create the needed content which is unique and with great quality. 
• Find the best places and channels to publish and share the content. Be focused on your core values. Review and analyze the entire process to make necessary automation. 

Competitor Research

For any start up finding and understanding the competitor is crucial as it will provide an insight of the scope and risks of your own business. 

This includes:

• Identify the competitor entrepreneurs
• Analyze their market performances
• Find their customer strength and range
• Do a research on their techniques and tactics of generating leads and customers
• Be aware of their strengths and weaknesses along with their marketing and content strategy

• Notice their unique qualities and offers
• Track how they follow up the new possibilities and technology updates
• Find their advertising methods and platform 
• Analyze their product/service quality and compare with your own
• Consider the cost of the competitor’s Products/services
• Understand the customer feedback of the competitors
• Have an eye on their promotion activities and new events
• Be aware of their experience and existence

Social Media Presence

Social media is being the place where the people spend most of their time and attention. So it is a brilliant idea to be on their eyesight. 

• Choose the right places, channels and networks
• Know the customers and be targeted
• Understand their needs and preferences   
• Include the social media channels and icons in your websites as well as include your website in all social media channels
• Create the unique and relevant content to engage the customers
• Let it be shared among other people
• Select the good tools to create, modify and improve the contents
• Maintain the presence every time. Let them know you are there
• Track the feedback and analyze the drawbacks. Be focused on that and take necessary actions
• Do not forget the hashtags and links to your website

Build Your Brand

Discover your brand for building it strongly. Purchase a domain that suits your brand. It will help you to improve brand popularity. Create a website for the brand and design an eye catching logo. Provide the best user experience. Do not give the purpose of your brand the less importance. Make an idea of your competitor brand. Define the targeted audience range for your brand. Make your brand and products more memorable and reliable. No compromise on quality and customer experience. Do not be the exact copy of the popular or well established brand. Keep in mind all these factors while considering your brand and branding.  

Aim for an SEO Friendly Website

An SEO friendly website should be: 

• Including all the important and required keyword
• Fully Indexable Pages
• Organized well for the search engines to be read and crawled
• Include a sitemap to make search engine help discover every page of the website
• Have links from other trusted sources
• Be user friendly
• Visually entertaining
• Be with error free coding
• Not include copy contents
• Not contain too much or too less content
• Up to date with the relevant content
• Be compatible for all devices
• Be of optimized size, especially images 
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Explaining the vision and mission of your business
• Describe what your business does and the purpose
• Enough information to connect with you, including the links to your own social media channels 
• Better with an option to provide feedback 
• Include Meta keywords, Meta description and robots.txt

Improve Trustworthiness

Improving the trustworthiness to your business and being honest and loyal is really important as it will determine your business quality and customer satisfaction. Failure to maintain trustworthiness will cause significant impacts in customer experience and thereby degrade your business standards, which will lead to a big failure. 

The ways to improve trustworthiness are:

• Do not compromise on quality
• Deliver the best at the correct time
• Be consistent with your products/services
• Let the customers be informed about your policy/strategy updates
• Do not put forward the offers that you cannot execute
• Be honest with your ideas and procedures
• Develop a comfortable employee group and environment for the customers
• Take responsibility for errors and mistakes and be transparent
• Try to provide answers or solutions for all queries from the customers 
• Let the prices and offers be real and transparent, don’t lie on it
• Keep the contracts and other documents up to date
• Keep your promises and offers  

List Your Business in Top Directories

There are a lot of web directories where we can list our business so that it will get a high preference and rank. 

Some of the business directories are: 

• Yelp
• Yellow Pages
• Kudzu
• Thumbtack
• CitySquares
• Judy’s Book
• USdirectory.com
• MagicYellow
• Fave
• EZlocal.com
• Craigslist
• JustDial
• Yalwa
• 2FindLocal

Fix All Technical Issues

A technical issue can be expected any time at any format. The best practice and solution is to remove the errors as soon as possible so that it will not affect the smooth work environment and customer experience. 

The most common technical issues could be:

• Outdated website design: The primary designing for a website is not enough for maintaining a good customer experience and interaction. You should focus on the current modern & professional web design standards and updates. The website design should be updated regularly. The visual designing of the website is also crucial. 
• Poor SEO standards and Low quality contents: A good on-site practice will be very helpful for a better website. Try to keep a fair implementation of SEO activities and quality contents.    
• Lack of optimization for mobile devices: It will be a great fault if you underestimate the importance of accessibility of the website through mobile phone. The website should be optimized for mobile friendliness also.  
• Time consuming features on website: All the activities of the website should be optimized for less consumption of time, like website loading and uploading time. The size of the website also should be kept minimum.  
• Absence of Social Sharing icons: The social media channels and pages are also as important as the website to manage a standard for the brand. The icons of social networks should be visible at your website and must be linked to the corresponding pages properly. 
• Broken links and backup failure: Some Server issues may cause your website to be down for a while or some security failures will lead to hacking. In such situations, proper backup will help to maintain the website functionality. One more important point is to avoid any broken links on your website as it will result in being penalized by the Search Engine. 

Some other unpredicted or unexpected failures can be expected here but the necessary thing is the prompt action to resolve the issues. 

Common Pitfalls 

Never buy links

One of the big dangers is that buying links. You need not to buy links as they may negatively impact your experience and business. There are so many ways to create links naturally, explore them. 

Search engines only need genuine and natural links. If you buy or sell the links for the purpose of back linking you may get banned from the search engines as it will be considered as spam. Also some search engines like Google do not encourage no-follow links also, which will be useful in case of some other SEs. Another good practice is to create links for all pages of your website/blog, stop focusing on creating links for the home page only. The links from the irrelevant/not related niche websites should be avoided, because it will be penalized. Careful to take your own time to build links.

 Too many links in a short period of time will cause negative impacts rather than advantages. Focus on quality instead of quantity. Track the linked sites and their relevance. Take prompt actions when the quality of the linked site is falling.