Jon Santillan, digital marketing manager – SEO at Eithad.com, and advisor to Searchfuse.com, explains why search engine optimisation is so important for start-up and SMEs, and how to get started.
“Content is king, but distribution is queen.” That statement has been popular for a while now. Your start-up may have the best content in the world, but unless potential customers can find you, your content is of no help to your business.
One of the ways your content is found is through correct usage of search engine optimisation (SEO).
While SEO is important for all industries, big or small, there is an ardent need for this specialised service especially for start-up companies.
‘Why?’ you may ask. The answer cannot be explained in one simple sentence, but it is important to understand that a great product is not overly useful without the right audience. If SEO is what you have been considering for some time now, the below will be beneficial for you.
Start with Great Content
As inbound and content marketing become more widespread among companies, the importance of having great content on your start-up’s website grows. Concentrate on developing content that gives your customers information they really want and need. As long as you do so, your readers will come back for more. They are also more willing to share this type of content, whether on social media channels or by linking back to it on their own blogs and websites.
Also, get in the habit of writing relevant SEO copy now to grow traffic to your website. To be truly successful at SEO copywriting, you need to engage in keyword research.
Add Keyword Research
Exposing your start-up to customers is the point of your website, but are the best possible customers on your website? By embarking on keyword research, you not only figure out the best ways to drive customers to your website, but also gain a deeper understanding of what your customers value. There are a number of keyword research tools, such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads Intelligence, to help you find this information. Your webmaster will also have access to the keywords customers used to find your site.
As you add to your web presence by expanding the content offerings on your website, your site becomes more attractive to search engines. This is accomplished through the sheer number of pages with appropriate keywords, but also through the addition of links. Other trusted sites link to your content in their own content, and you should build links to your already-existing content in each new piece of content you write.
After you have written your great content and utilised well-thought-out on-page SEO, you want to post your content to social media to help your site draw attention.
Post on Social Media
Social shares may not have as much weight in the search engine algorithms as correct linking does, but it is important. As your great content is shared again and again, the search engines and influencers take notice. As your content is shared, other sites may link to it, as well.
However, you do not have to wait until someone stumbles across your web pages and decides to share them. Once you have added new content to your website, post it on relevant social media platforms. Go beyond simply posting the link to your profile page. Perhaps you are a part of a group where someone has asked a question about a subject you addressed in a blog post. Post a link to your blog post along with a short paragraph describing why it is helpful.
Measure and Start Again
No one is 100 percent correct when they begin an SEO campaign. As you publish content to your website, use the metrics from older web pages to improve upon your previous attempts. You should also edit those older web pages to continue improving your metrics. After all, to get the “classic web marketing formula,” as described in Moz’s The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, “. . .we need to understand our own websites, make some hypotheses, test, and repeat.”
Conclusion
It is important to understand that SEO is a collection of strategies, tactics, and best practices that maximise the likelihood of one’s website appearing in search results (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc). It pushes the search engines to crawl and index every page on the Internet in an effort to understand each page and to whom it would be relevant. They attempt to emulate human behaviour. This can be achieved by choosing important keywords and understanding the methods search engines employ to determine a webpage’s relevance, one can increase frequency of a website’s appearance in search results and increase website traffic.
Websites and companies are competing with one another for traffic, branding, marketing, and sales opportunities. With an SEO strategy in place you can increase the likelihood of a click which depends on relative position, text in title and description of result. SEO is cost effective, and is a long-term plan, start today and you will see the increase in your online visibility automatically.
Your competitors are doing it, it is your time to start!
