5 SEO Strategies Start-Ups Must Get Right - Search Engine People - Search Engine People (blog)

Every Start-Up Needs to Focus on its Online Presence From the Get Go

Today, there are more new start-ups per month than ever. Getting noticed and standing out from the crowd means strategically focusing your SEO efforts.

The world is seeing more new business start-ups than at any time in its history. According to British data from the Centre for Entrepreneurs, almost 600,000 new businesses opened their doors in 2017, and early indications from their startup tracker suggest that 2018 will be another bumper year for entrepreneurs.

Of course, there are less encouraging statistics, too, including the much-quoted rumour that as few at 15 percent of new businesses survive longer than 18 months. One thing that's certain is that with so many start-ups, each and every business sector is becoming more crowded and competitive than ever. Getting noticed, and ensuring your business is the one that comes up on a prospective customer's web search is crucial, and that's why adopting the right SEO strategy is core to long term success.

The trouble is that many entrepreneurs are simply too busy with the day to day running of the business to think too much about topics like SEO. This is why using the services of freelance SEO consultants makes so much sense. Not only do they have the expertise, they will also be able to dedicate the time to putting your business on the map. Here are five key areas they will look at to make a genuine difference and get your site climbing the results pages.

1) Content

It is easy to get caught up in the technical aspects of a website, but what has the biggest impact on success or failure is the content. It needs to be fresh, engaging, interesting and varied.

Content does not just mean what's written on your main webpages. It also includes your news or blog articles, images, videos, social media, email marketing, and literally everything else that you produce.

2) Format

The majority of web searches are now carried out on mobile devices, so if your site is not mobile-friendly you will be stymied from the start. One of the first things an SEO expert will check is that your site works properly across all platforms. And that includes the buttons, forms and so on.

Another important consideration here is speed. If pages take a long time to load, today's surfers will simply click the back button and go somewhere else – and you'll never see them again.

3) Local Results

It is easy to forget that the world wide web means just that. Most start ups will want to focus on finding customers in their local areas, and there are some specific tools and strategies that SEO experts use to get your site ranking in the geographical areas that matter most. Use Google's My Business to get in Google's local listings, along with local directories such as Yell and Thomson Local.

4) Keywords

Keyword research is the primary concept that underlies a successful SEO strategy. Working out the right keywords to focus on, and taking into consideration the way modern searches are undertaken, for example semantic search, voice search, etc is where your industry expertise and an SEO consultant's technical know-how can combine to create great things. Use tools such as SEMRush and Google's Search Console to see what keywords are relevant to your business.

5) Technical Seo

Technical SEO simply means the broader non-content related aspects to SEO. A consultant will look at optimising things like site structure, meta content, internal and external links and so on. It's not as scary as it sounds, but it can be time consuming to get it right. This is another area in which expert help really pays dividends.

Use tools such as GTMetrix to analyse speed, as well as the Fetch and Render As Googlebot feature in Search Console, to ensure that your site loads quickly and properly. Review meta data, specifically site titles and descriptions, and match these to your page's keyword targets. Compress images so hat the load faster, and optimise both server and CMS for HTML compression and web caching for faster loading.

There are many ways to improve your website, and the unfortunate fact is that many great web designers do not grasp all the SEO rules, so often a great looking website will be poorly optimised for search engine performance.