The Ultimate SEO Guide For Startups

Launching a New Startup or Business Website? This SEO Guide Will Help You Out!

When businesses and online startups start work on their websites, they have higher aspirations in terms of business growth, website traffic and branding. But many of them end up disappointed and even with financial losses. This mostly happens to businesses that:

• Leave SEO for later
• Ignore On-page
• Expect more at less

In the last few years, we have seen many business owners struggle due to above points. This SEO guide for new websites and startups will end the suffering by sharing practical SEO approach and optimization tips.
For the sake of simplicity, we have categorized SEO tips and guidelines for new websites under three main headings.

So, let’s get going with our very first point!

Hire SEO Consultant in Design & Development Phase
Sounds like an obvious sales pitch? Yes it does but it’s not. Having an SEO guy by your side during website design and development phase would be the best decision you will ever made.
An SEO expert will guide you with technicalities that will never cross your mind but can make a world of difference. Here are few points through which an SEO professional can improve performance of your SEO strategy for new website:

Old Domain Considerations – Buying an old domain name for ranking advantage is great idea unless it has been penalized. Launching your new website on a penalized domain can be nothing less than a disaster. If you plan on doing so, then, you need an SEO professional to check the health status of the domain.

Domain Name Guidance – If you know a thing about SEO, then, you must have heard about Google’s EMD update. For those who don’t, it is an update that penalizes exact match domains. This however doesn’t mean you shouldn’t capture a keyword in domain name. You can but you have to do it tactfully. Experienced SEO professional can help you with this.

Content Optimization Help – In the effort to make the website rank higher on Google, website owners are often tempted to indulge in keyword stuffing. An SEO specialist will make sure that you don’t get wrong with keyword usage and maintain the right balance.

Extension Guidance – Running websites on two extensions is something that top SEO experts never suggest. Choose www.abc.com or abc.com; just make sure you don’t go with both. If you have chosen the right SEO consult, he will make sure that you do.

Redirection Issues – Businesses moving to a new website from an old one need to work out redirection to avoid losing traffic. This is critical for future SEO benefits as well. Your SEO sidekick will make sure that the redirection work is handled before major money is pumped into online marketing.

Assistance with SEO Issues – While launching a new website, various issues can come in the web design and development phase. We have seen website suffer with site crawling and ranking due to URL structure, improper use of breadcrumbs, undefined categories and demo server complexities.

Bonus SEO Tip – New websites also need to watch out for content duplication. Never reuse the content already present on internet for your business site. Start thinking about website content during website design and development phase itself.

You may have the best SEO plan for your website but if your design and development team messed up above listed points, then, it can do little to help you. Now, it’s time to move on to our next main point.

Start On-Page Optimization Work
Congratulations! Your website is up and running. If you paid attention to above listed SEO tips for your website promotion, then, it is ready to be optimized for better ranking and traffic. Focus on below mentioned points to get best results for your new business site or startup:

Website Audit – While some designers and developers play with On-page aspects and technicalities while working, others leave it for later. Website audit will reveal the factors on which work is pending and requires immediate attention.

Keyword Research – Decide keywords that are most relevant to you. Vast range of terms and phrases can be targeted for any business but it serves best to zero on few keywords and their variations.

URL Structure – URLs are crucial to make website pages appear in search results for relevant queries. If optimized correctly, they can increase visibility of website pages on Google. So, make sure your SEO team gets the structure right.

Meta Tags and Header Tags Optimization – Both these tags help the bots in making sense of the page and determining its relevancy for search queries. Hence, they need to be planned with utmost care. This is one point that no one can afford to miss in his ‘SEO for new website’ checklist.

Alt Tags Optimization – Images can also generate traffic by coming up in image search results and hence need to be planned beforehand. Effective use of alt tags will help you in capturing keywords and further improve search engine presence. Don’t forget to handle this for your startup site.

XML Sitemap and Robots.Txt – Sitemap is the list of pages referred by crawlers (and also users) to learn how they are related to each other. Robots.txt on the other hand tells about the pages that needn’t be crawled. Both are critical from ranking point of view and thus need to be part of your On-page work.

Other On-Page tags – Your on-page work doesn’t finish with above points. You also need to think about canonical tag, robots Meta tag, and other critical tags. If you are catering multiple geographical locations and want to serve relevant language results on search engines, then, Href Lang tag will come handy. Learn about more crucial tags.

Make sure your SEO team works on all the above mentioned points if you truly want your new website to become traffic magnet. The work however is not finished yet. Your website is search engine friendly but it still needs marketing work to generate benefits. Next section will help you in mastering online marketing for your startup or business website.

Online Marketing But Smarter
There are hundreds of blog posts that list SEO tips for optimization & promotion for new websites. We want to go beyond that by sharing our personal industry insights to help you take strategic decisions while marketing your new website. Keep below points in mind while creating marketing plan for your new online venture:

SEO Before Paid ads – This point is strictly for brands who are newcomers on internet with no online presence worth mentioning. For such businesses, it is important to create brand presence before investing in paid marketing. The logic behind this is that visitors almost never convert on first visit; if visitors find no sign of your brand on internet on later enquiry, then, you have lost a lead.

Solid Marketing Budget – In last 10 years, we have seen hundreds of companies that built impressive online platforms but failed due to lack of marketing efforts. This mostly happened because they spent most of the budget on site development and kept little for marketing. You need to put aside a considerable chunk for SEO of your new website promotion to get maximum coverage. The best approach is to put aside money for SEO and marketing during design-development phase itself.

Sparing few hundred dollars every month on SEO will lead you nowhere, because If you are a new brand and think with little investment and just working on free resources you can beat established rivals then, you have a tough time ahead. Even working only with free resources will neither establish you as an authority brand nor generate much traffic. For instance, if you are starting a new online clothing store, you need to advertise in lifestyle online magazines for brand building. Also keep some for social media to get traffic as well as branding benefits. While we are at it, let’s familiarize you with truth of social media as well.

• Truth about social media – It is a known fact that social media can generate free business traffic but you need creative graphics, images, banners and frequent updates. Activity on all the major social media channels is required with unique visual content. And all this design work requires a big budget.

Keep a Watch – You have every right to know what your hired SEO agency is doing to make your startup website dominate top search results. Ask for detailed monthly or weekly reports to learn about techniques and strategies being used. If you are spending thousands of dollars but your hired guys are still working only on free resources, then, you are not getting worth of your investment.

Brand Building First – Obsessing over website ranking in initial months is the worst thing you can do for your project. As owner of a new website, your goal should be to build your brand identity. This involves introducing your central idea, beliefs, and team to target audience. Press releases, online media coverage, CEO interviews and social media activity can benefit greatly in brand building task. Visual media like images, explainer videos, and infographics can also play crucial role in the task. Once you have done that, you can pester your SEO partner for search engine ranking

Additional Considerations – When it comes to SEO, everyone wants top ranking and that too in record time. Nowadays, Google wants nothing less than perfection and thus one needs to keep market realities in mind. Here are few points for you:

• Be patient. Give your SEO team time to generate results.
• If you want quick results, be prepared to spend.
• Never go ahead with SEO and online marketing without website audit.
• Hire a team that shares detailed work plan before project inception.

There are thousands of SEO companies across the world that claim to be the best in the business; obviously not all of them are. The best way to hire an SEO firm is by studying

• Past work
• Industry experience
• Work approach

Just keep these 3 points in mind, and you will find the right SEO company for launching your new website or startup.

Still have SEO questions about launching your new website? Post them in the comments section and I will answer them right here!

Source : business2community