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Kickstarting a startup company is a thrilling undertaking; so many strategies, plans, deadlines, pivots, checks and balances to take care of. And, the growth favours the ones that tick all these factors in the right order.

Online marketing is one such critical strategy for growing startups, and SEO – its core pillar. However, there are many misconceptions and misbeliefs regarding SEO for businesses in their nascent stage.

Some believe SEO no longer works, some say it takes ‘too long to even show some noticeable results.

While an immaculately executed SEO strategy for startups might take 4-6 months to garner significant organic traffic, to say that it does not work is like saying that an internal combustion engine is no good for travelling on the highways.

SEO for startups, in fact for any business, works wonders if executed by a pro team that understands the pulse of the behemoth called Google.

That said, here are time-tested SEO tips for startups that will help them grow organically without burning too much of their paid media budget.

Tip #1. Content Quality Counts as Prime

Your website is like a storefront. It is essentially a digital property and a promotional asset for your enterprise. So, it is pretty intuitive that just a well-designed website won’t bring you much value without engaging content that resonates with your target audience.

The most common misconception in SEO for startups is that one is only optimizing the text & visual content for search engines. In fact, optimizing the content for human readers is an equally critical aspect of the overall SEO strategy.

Thus, content optimization comes in as one of the foundational factors in powering up your business with organic traffic via SEO.

Tip #2. Give Search Engines What They Want!

Search engines like Google have their own agenda for prioritizing a website over the other. When it comes to SEO, the high-ranking positions are usually won by the pages that have the following attributes:

• Accessibility: Search engines like Google must be able to access your page before they can analyze it for ranking signals.
• Quality content: By ‘Quality,’ we mean content that is relevant, unique and engaging for the user. Ideally, your content must answer all the questions or queries a user might have regarding the said topic. This is why we recommend publishing long-form content (up to 2500 words) every now and then on the website, and as guest blogs.
• Excellent UX: This goes without saying, but pages that offer great UX for the users are favoured by search engines over others. Great UX includes fast load times, data/SSL encryption, intuitive page navigation/layout and relevant content.
• Low Bounce Rate: A higher bounce rate of your web page is an indicator of poor UX or irrelevant content for the users. Avoid it to earn ranking brownie points!
• Content Updates & Optimization: Leading search engines like Google favour fresh content and regular optimizations. Hire one of the leading SEO services for startups to get this right.

Tip #3. Focus on On-Page Optimizations

An on-page optimization strategy will probably be your biggest focus during SEO implementation. While it covers a lot of steps, checks and technicalities that must be aligned, below are some pointers you can take care of;

• Page URL: Your page URL must be descriptive, readable and should include your main keyword. Usually, this URL will be the same as your page title, but without any stop words.
• Page titles: Page title is the clickable URL for search engines that appears as the blue link text on the search results page. To optimize it, you must make it descriptive and readable with the main keyword inserted where appropriate.
• Headings: Remember the old H1, H2, H3? Well, your page content must be broken in this manner for Google’s crawl-bots to read it easily and return a positive ranking signal.
• Keywords: It is a good practice to insert keywords in your page title and headings where appropriate. You can also use the keyword’s synonyms, variants and closely related terms in the main text body. However, avoid keyword stuffing as search engines can recognize it, and so do the users.
• Use images: Often, new businesses and startups forget about this part. But it is crucial that you break up page text with suitable images and optimise them for search. Compress image file size, include subject and keywords in the alt-text and so on.
• Internal links: This is so obvious yet so many new websites forget to implement this. You must interlink different website pages via content hyperlinking in the main text body.
• Optimize for Mobile: More than 50% of all Google’s search queries originate over smartphones. Needless to say, your on-page SEO strategy must include mobile-optimized pages for better ranking and UX points.

Your turn…

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