In today’s digital world, every business must have a smart website. Even if you do not sell online or don’t think you need a website, people will be looking for information about you and your new business. Here comes the importance of SEO for your success.
As a budding entrepreneur, you’ll appreciate a website that is not only the window to your company, but it can also sell, engage, persuade, or educate visitors better than any other medium. For prospective customers, it’s all about discovery, and for your existing clients, it’s about validation and retention.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a lot more to websites than just a fresh design, building pages and populating them with great content. If nobody discovers your site, most usually from Google, then it’s like owning a beautiful supercar and keeping it locked away in the garage. Nobody’s going to see it.
The art of increasing the number of visitors to your website is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The whole idea is to increase your rankings in the search engines for keywords that your potential customers type into Google. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency in Dallas, you want to come top of the rankings for anyone typing in ‘Dallas digital marketing agency.’
Fortunately, there are plenty of SEO agencies out there who can do all the leg work for you. As you will see in this article, there is a lot involved in successful SEO. It’s such a big area that there are even agencies dedicated to specific sectors. One of the most competitive markets is probably iGaming, where operators fight it out for customers, so it’s no surprise to find an iGaming SEO agency that will help them succeed.
There are three main areas of SEO that any entrepreneur should apply to get the best overall results: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-site SEO.
On-Page SEO for Startups
Getting good, relevant content on your pages is critical for the Google rankings. The secret is to research the keywords that people most commonly use when looking for the goods or services you provide. There are plenty of tools out there you can use, including a free one from Google, or services such as SEMRush.
Once you have selected your targeted keywords, you then need to weave them in cleverly to your page, in a well-structured way, without keyword ‘stuffing,’ which means cramming a keyword into a page so many times it looks unnatural.
If you are looking to attract local interest only, it might make sense to engage the services of a local search engine optimization agency. This approach also benefits those whose businesses will look to attract local traffic in multiple regions.
Related: 5 Benefits of Using People Search Engine
A Guide to Technical Search Engine Optimization
Technical SEO is not concerned with the content of your site; it’s all about the structure and how it affects performance. Typically, technical SEO will involve:
- Speed
- Mobile use
- Indexing
- Security
- Architecture
- Structured data
- Crawl capability
All these areas determine how easy it is for the search engines to determine what your content is, how easy it is to digest for readers, and how fast it can be delivered. All of these things combine to increase your rankings, and you can carry out this work whenever you have spare time.
Technical SEO has additional tasks if your site is targeting different countries and languages. It’s a whole subject in itself, covering language, culture, planning, geo-targeting, and more, but there’s a decent international SEO guide here.
Related: SEO for Business Growth: 6 Ways SEO Leads to Growth
Off-Site SEO, What it Achieves
The third key component of SEO is off-site. Essentially, it means what you can do away from your site to benefit you. It’s using other websites to grow your influence, reputation, and authority, and it’s done by link building.
In a perfect world, your website content will be so awe-inspiring that other websites naturally link to your pages, directing people to you because your content adds value. Google loves websites that have useful inbound links.
However, we all know it’s rare to get links from high-value target websites when you want them. You must, therefore, use off-site SEO practices to do it. First, run a competitor analysis to see which sites link to your competitors. Ask these websites to link back to you. Or you might offer to write content for them in return for a link back.
If you sell products, ask your suppliers to add your store website to their page. Write a blog for them about using their service. It’s a good material for them, and it gives you a link back.
Give Your Startup a Helping Hand With SEO
If entrepreneurs are serious about their SEO – and they should be – then a marketing strategy using all three of these fundamental SEO techniques is a must. Only then can you expect to improve your rankings and send more qualified leads to your website from the search engines. Once you get those leads on to your site, a whole new challenge awaits – converting them.
