Being a Startup person means capable of doing multiple things at a time. Staffing, outreach, paperwork, development, testing, financing along with several other things simultaneously goes on in a startup business. Startups, unlike other businesses, are by nature much volatile that crave for heavy lifting at the early beginning of their lifecycle.
Though our brilliant entrepreneurs are already experts in their niches but they always had double thought on the implementation of a well-structured SEO strategy. Maybe they think there will be an extra expense on dedicated SEO resources or they will need a complete marketing team for the optimization. But my dear entrepreneurs! there is nothing like that. Even you can implement your own SEO strategy at an early stage that can pay dividends down the line as your business grows.
For a brand new website, SEO ensures that when people search for your business, they will be able to find your web address in the search engine results. After a certain period of time with the fuller implementation of SEO, people will also be able to find your products and services when they put a search query related to them instead of your competitor’s.
SEO is really a slow game. It takes months of optimization to achieve but starting sooner rather than later is always recommended. Below are some essential SEO tips for any newly born startup to implement. Some only take few minutes while some take little more development assistance- but believe me, each provides a distinct benefit to your website. So start your ride on as soon as possible!
Rule #1: Be pretty sure that your site can be indexed!
This should be the very first thing you need to keep in mind. Search engines totally rely upon some automated programs known as “bots” or “spiders” who move between the internal and external links to your website and store information they find in the index of the search engine. These indexes are massively huge databases from where a search engine based on a certain algorithm pulls out the relevant page that best matches the query of a user.
So it is totally your responsibility that you make the path very clear for the bots to crawl your website since if they find any obstacle in between like broken links, hidden content or any other crawl issue, they won’t be able to fully explore your site. Consequently, your content won’t be picturized in the index and that’s why won’t be displayed in natural search results.
So at first set up an account with Google Webmaster Tools to be aware of different crawling issues that you might face in near future.
Rule #2: Do proper Keyword research!
Keywords are the specific search queries for which you definitely would like your site to appear in natural search results and any SEO strategy largely depends upon the identification of individual keywords. For example, you own a startup in Vancouver, Canada then your targeted keywords must be like Vancouver companies, Vancouver startup or IT companies in Vancouver etc. Again, Search engine crawling programs are automated and they rely upon some arbitrary signals to determine what your content is about and is it any good or not? The inclusion of relevant keywords among your content (as in your title tag, in your headings or anywhere in your body content) increases your chances to be noticed by these search engine bots.
Rule #3: Keyword Characteristics you need to keep in mind:
Don’t pick anything that matches your brand as a keyword. Keep the following keyword characteristics in mind while determining which search query to optimize your website for:
Search Volume: There will be an estimation of the number of times a particular keyword phrase is searched for each month. The higher the number is, the more potential traffic you tend to get.
Competition: Competition tells you how many other websites have been optimized for a particular keyword phrase. Until and unless you own a well-funded startup don't go for high competition keywords.
Keyword Intent: Obviously, the keyword that you choose should match your business objectives. Don’t pick a phrase like Vancouver jobs if you really are not offering any jobs in Vancouver.
Hope, you got my point :P
After taking all the points into consideration, shortlist 5 to 10 keywords and start your own optimization campaign.
Rule #4: Make proper link building strategy:
This should be treated as the highest priority task in your overall SEO strategy. Building quality inbound links that directs others to your web page plays a big role in its overall natural search performance.
Follow these points to carry forward your link building strategy:
- Provide Guest posts at high authority sites.
- Contact sites that review the products of your industry.
- Send press releases to major news sites.
- Viral your content on social media networks.
- Add your business to relevant business directories(or top citation sites) within your industry.
Ultimately the whole SEO thing revolves around the quality of content that you frequently post on your website. So publish healthy and nonspammy content and get your site indexed on search engine result pages.
Offpage optimization is lifeless without content, the quality content. Most of the marketers are always confused about SEO and content marketing relationships. SEO and content are a great fit together. Are they odds without each other? How can someone fit both together for successful off-page SEO? And the list of questions goes on. Some people think that content marketing eliminates the need for search engine optimization completely and this is completely false. In clear terms, SEO states the requirement for internet marketing success of any website and content marketing fulfills that requirement. When search engine optimization demands content, keywords, backlinks, onsite technical optimization and a consistent output; then quality content fulfills all these demands for website optimization.
The days are gone when you could share links with your partners for off page optimization needs. Today, the mission of major search engines like Google is to give only useful, high quality and relevant information to their surfers. This information must be arranged in an easy-to-read format and easily accessible to the people who need it. A website hosting company having links from a restaurant website is not acceptable by Google and major search engines either ban or penalize such deals.
It’s true that link building is a must for off-page search engine optimization, for quality links, many marketers have turned towards guest blogging. Guest posts allow creating quality links with high-quality content for your business on the web. This is important because quality content is the key to successful off-page optimization. You need to create content that is unique, original to the visitors that they find a shareable on their blogs, social media profiles, and even websites. To put it into simple words, modern offsite SEO is not all about link building and link exchanging only. But it is about earning links naturally. Google doesn’t want you to create links that look irrelevant and unnatural on the web. Instead, it wants you to create high-quality content that visitors like to link to in a natural manner. Remember that you have to create content for human beings, not for search engines. Don’t put unnatural links in your content, unless these are necessary.
To understand content in regards to on-page and off page SEO, it is important to understand both individually. On page, SEO relates to keywords. You have to the most profitable keywords in your website content in a natural way. Make sure that you follow the guidelines set by search engines while writing content on your web pages. This content must be written by human and must be error-free and free from redundancy.
Off page, SEO has contrasted with it. Undoubtedly, off page optimization is all about link building, but the quality links and content. There are two ways to do this. You create high-quality content, attract your visitors to your website and earn natural inbound links to your web pages. Secondly, according to Google, if you have great content on your web pages, it will naturally attract visitors to engage with you and webmasters to link to you.
How to Create High-Quality Content for Offpage Optimization?
The most important SEO factor for creating high-quality content is doing good keyword research. Using various free or paid keyword research tools, you can discover the best search terms that searchers are using to find your services or goods. The next step after keyword research is to place those phrases or terms within your content. Many people follow keyword density, proximity, and many other concepts. But experts of search engine optimizations say that you have to sue your common sense only. You have to create high quality and natural looking content no matter how many and how less time you have used the keywords. All you need is to remember that search engines love fresh and useful content. Try to solve your customers’ questions and problem within your content. And, your content must be easy to read as well as easy access for both, search engines and your potential customers.
Many people ask that if they should use guest blogging or not for creating quality content and inbound links. This is a tricky question. Guest blogging for off page optimization is effective. But it has become a center of spammers, since last few years. We are not asking you to stop guest blogging, but take spammer prevention measures to leverage guest blogging to the fullest. Remember, only write posts for reputed guest blogging sites, use no-follow links, write original content and don’t send spam emails to website owners for guest blogging opportunities. Overall, your off page optimization and content marketing should go hand-in-hand thoughtfully.
Since search algorithms are always changing, it’s important to adapt your SEO strategy to suit online trends. These are some of strategies that you can employ this year to help your site rank better on search engines.
Know what the most important ranking factors are
Ranking factors change constantly, so it is important to stay up to date with this information. In 2016, SEO experts have determined which factors are most likely to affect your SEO rankings. These include mobile-optimisation, readability and design. Still, links are the juice that drive rankings, so it is important that your site has great content that will generate valuable backlinks from across the web.
Ensure your site is responsive or at least mobile-optimised
With more and more internet users accessing the internet from their mobile devices, it is crucial that your website is mobile-optimised. This means that your site can be accessed easily from smartphones and tablets. This is now taken into account by Google so if your site is not mobile responsive yet, now is the time to look into that.
Consider the emerging trend of voice search
A growing trend among Apple, Android and Windows devices sees more and more users employing voice search.To show up in the radar of voice searches, there are a number of ways to make your site voice search-friendly. Many voice searches use long-tail keywords, so be sure to begin including these in your site content Also consider the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions that users ask search engines when conducting voice searches. FAQs are a great way to cater to these search terms.
Use long-tail keywords to focus on user intent
Google has evolved to look deeper than the keywords with which users search; it now is focused on the ‘search intent’ of its users to help them find what they are looking for more easily. When considering user intent, you will find yourself targeting more long-tail keywords (which use 3 or more words). You can also explore some kinds of related source throughout Moz, SEJ (Search Engine Journal) and Search Engine Watch.
For example, many companies will focus on general terms with high search volume, such as ‘best laptop’ but when considering user intent, keywords should expand to include more descriptive terms, such as ‘best laptop for travel’ or ‘best laptop for graphic design’. This will also allow you to write great content that is not only in line with your keywords but also ensure that the content is organic and natural.
One of the major benefits of using long-tail keywords is that there is less competition for them, so they will be much easier to boost in rankings. There may be lower search volume for these terms, but you will get plenty of organic traffic once they start to rank on the first page.
Go Local
Many SEO strategies look at the big picture of attracting users worldwide – but, it’s always best to start tapping into your local market first. 50% of everyone who visit a store’s website will end up visiting the actual store the same day. So, it is important to consider local SEO strategies for your site.
Ensure that your business is listed correctly across the internet. You don’t want the wrong name, address or phone number being listed anywhere. In addition to losing out on business, you could also see your online authority ranking drop.
Browse directory and review sites that are relevant to your company (such as TripAdvisor or Yelp). Google takes this into account when considering a site’s rankings, and it helps to increase your visibility in your local community.
Nothing dampens the spirit of an online marketer than a Google algorithm update. You strive hard to align your website according to Google and a small change spoils everything. But Google does it for everyone’s own good – every change brings you closer to the high ranking on the search engine, but only if you are genuinely following the Google’s policies. However, if you know how Google ranks different sites for different search queries, things become a whole lot easier for you. And for that, there are many SEO analysis tools – some free, some paid – that help you audit your own website like Google does.
SEO professionals certainly know the importance of these tools. For the newbie, it is important to know that SEO analysis tools are those supporting tools which help you understand the right keyword for your website, linking, and competition on the Internet. These tools guide your SEO practices in the right direction and help you get fast ranking on search engines. Here are 10 best tools discussed below:
1. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools are a combination of various SEO Analyzing tools offered by Google itself. For example, one such tool is “Fetch as Google” that allows you to see if Google bot can crawl your web page, how it displays the page and checks if any of your web pages is blocked by Google bot. You are allowed 500 fetches per week and once you get closer to this figure, Google notifies you. Also, “Page Speed Insights” tool measures the speed of your website on desktop and mobile. According to Google developers, the Page Speed score ranges from 0 to 100 points; a higher score indicates better performance. But this criterion keeps on changing according to new rules and updates in the tool.
Cost: FREE
2. Check My Links
As the name suggests, this tool checks and ensures that all your internal, as well as external links, work properly. Every website has many pages and every page has many links. It’s not possible to check all links manually for their functionality. But “Check My Links” tool does it for you instantly. It highlights all good links in green color and broken links in red color, making it easier to check which links work and which don’t.
Cost: FREE
3. Moz Pro Tools
The Moz Pro is another set of SEO tools that check the important factors related to your website’s search ranking. With these tools, you can identify your SEO opportunities, track your business growth on the Internet, get reports of your site performance and then optimize your overall SEO efforts accordingly. One of such tools is “Crawl test Tool” that utilizes Moz’s own web crawler named Roger Bot to check all URLs on the Internet related to your websites and provides a report through email. This is a very helpful tool to check your website for crawl ability factors like duplicate content, spam links and redirects etc.
Cost: Free 30-day trial and then paid plans
4. SEO Report Card
Up City’s SEO Report Card tool lets you determine where your website stands against your competitors. All you need is to provide website and your contact information, and you will get your site’s SEO report card covering following key factors:
Ranking Report: A snapshot of your site ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing based on the
keywords selected for the report card.
Backlinks: Total number and list of pages that link back to your website.
On-page Keyword Analysis: How well your main keywords have been incorporated in your site?
Website Accessibility: Calculated load time of your website and ease of accessibility by crawlers.
Trust Metrics: Trust or authority level for your website.
Indexing: Number of your site pages indexed on the web.
Cost: Free
5. HubSpot’s Website Grader
Hubspot’s website grader is an online tool that helps generate a personalized audit report for your site based on the following SEO metric: performance (page size, request and speed), mobile readiness (responsiveness and viewport settings), accessibility of website by human and bots (page titles and meta descriptions) and security for visitors (if their information is safe or not). Just give your website’s URL and email address, and you will get a score ranging between 0-100 with a detailed report on your email within a few seconds only.
Cost: Free
6. Varvy’s SEO Overview Tool
Varvy’s SEO Overview tool audits your website for key parameters like domain strength, links, image SEO, social counts, on-page SEO, technical status, page speed, loading time and more. To your surprise,the report is prepared in less than a minute after checking every performance factor of your website deeply. The severity of issues is marked by green checks, red Xs, and yellow exclamation signs.
Cost: Free
7. Screaming Frog SEO Spider,
Every website has uncountable URLs and checking them manually is so time-consuming and overwhelming. Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool does it for you within a few seconds, even for larger websites. This tool has been made in Java with easy functionality. You can export the data into excel for further analysis. So it is the best friend of SEO professionals.
Cost: LITE version is FREE (with limited access). For advance access, you have to purchase 12-month
license for around $160 per year.
8. Found’s SEO Audit Tool
This is a super easy tool that identifies the SEO errors on your website. All you have to do is enter your website’s URL and you will get an automated audit report of your site. It checks the site for technical issues, content issues and external link analysis. You can also download its report in PDF form for further analysis.
Cost: Free
9. Remove’em
If you have ever been into black-hat SEO, spam, and un-natural links, Google will never forgive you and you can be penalized by google anytime. This will hurt your site ranking and ultimately your business. To avoid the blunder, use Remove’em tool. It scans your site for backlinks and lists them with contact information required for link removal. You can also export the list if you want to remove bad links using Google’s other tools. Most importantly, it tells Google not to count these links while crawling the site, thus save your website.
Cost: Paid
10. Woorank
This tool deeply analyze your website and reveals each opportunity for your SEO improvement by focusing on key factors like social media, technologies, local SEO, visitors, usability, search ranking efforts and mobile SEO. Each report spans across 70+ metrics that would reveal each and everything about your SEO successes and failure along with the improvement needed. Reports can be easily downloaded as PDF and distributed among your staff for reviews.
Cost: FREE 14-day trial and then paid plans
Finding the exact strategy of Google is really not possible. But using the SEO analysis tools, you can increase the chances of your website’s high ranking that will bring you more traffic and eventually, more business and profit. These tools can be used for the simple or the complex Shopify websites. A Shopify SEO expert uses these tools for finding the errors and the issues in an E-commerce website. So use these tools for better results and client satisfaction.
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