The exciting news is now that lots of software and startup companies have made initial efforts to modernize their infrastructures, they’re poised for real growth. If that’s you — if you’ve recently adopted cloud-based CMS and CRM solutions, it’s time to put them to work and start growing your business.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

Learn more

How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

Here are six digital marketing strategies and ideas for startups to help you graduate to that next level of digitization in the year ahead.

1. Content Marketing

To make growth happen, startup companies need to build on their initial efforts and begin focusing their digital marketing strategies on broader horizons.

And right now, there’s no horizon more promising and full of potential than the customer experience (CX).

Companies who embrace the CX credo — buyers are customers who expect to be delighted — will win. And what better way to ingratiate your company with purchasing managers than to offer helpful resources that make their job easier. Do this through content marketing.

More than three-quarters of startup companies already have a blog. However, there’s a big difference between simply having a blog and putting it to work as part of a content marketing strategy for your startup company. What you need is a data-driven blog.

Begin by finding out what your buyers need. There are several tools at your disposal for this. First, you can use keyword tools to find what’s trending in your industry. If you’re in the rental industry, for instance, you could then offer unique and creative ideas they might want to implement. These same tools will let you know which topics actually have search traffic and which are in demand so you’re not wasting time producing and promoting content that nobody wants to read.

Secondly, need is driven by pain, so think deeply about your B2B and B2C customers and what they lack, what causes them to ‘suffer’. Then, supply the kind of content that relieves those pain points. Almost half of the buyers consume online content (3-5 pieces) before reaching out to a sales rep. It should be your content they’re consuming. It should also be well-informed since almost all B2B buyers want the content they consume to include input from industry leaders.

Some examples of buyer pain points that you can help alleviate with helpful content:

• they lack information about products
• they struggle to compare products (46 percent of B2B buyers report that it’s difficult to compare products online)
• they struggle to understand new technologies
• they find it hard to stay current with industry developments

2. Inbound Marketing/SEO

A solid base of helpful content can also be the cornerstone of a successful inbound digital marketing for startups. You’ve done the research and produced great content for your buyers for your content marketing campaign. Now make it do double duty by earning some SEO credit.

You’ll need to do some deeper research, however: keyword research that goes deeper and shows you where you could focus your efforts and try to rank. Consider long-tail keywords if your industry is competitive, and write data-driven content that helps your SEO efforts.

Check all SEO statistics.

The trick is to balance SEO content techniques with user experience. SEO content, which employs strategic placement of keywords throughout the content, can come off as awkward. You want good, relevant, resourceful and helpful content that reads well, so keep that balance in mind with all your content. The idea, after all, is to try and get people to create backlinks to your startup website. This can happen in any number of ways, including organically, through guest posting, and via social media promotion. You can check the startup SEO services page to download my SEO growth program that outlines the most common link building and SEO strategies.

3. Social Media Marketing

Because of its rich targeting potential and wide reach, Facebook marketing funnels remains one of the most effective ways to generate leads in B2B and B2C world and should be a part of your startup digital marketing strategy. It’s also It is affordable compared to YouTube influencer costs. Over 60 percent of startup marketers plan to increase their Facebook Advertising efforts, according to a 2025 report.

You’ll need to identify your target persona and the companies you are going after and then create that profile on Facebook Ad Manager.  You can also set up a remarketing pixel and target your website visitors and lookalike audiences to make the profile targeted and relevant. That way, you’ll maximize ROI and, depending on your marketing objectives, you can create campaigns that:

1. generate leads
2. drive traffic
3. increase engagement
4. develop brand awareness
5. install apps
6. increase sales
7. get video views

Other options that are available on Ad Manager dashboard include:

• type of ad (photo ads, video ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, etc)
• campaign objective
• type of audience targeting (Facebook connections, Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences)
• budget
• scheduling

4. Responsive Web Design, HTTPS, AMP

Faced with more buyers who expect a better customer experience, B2B players now need to take their cues from B2C and look for ways to delight their buyers wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.

The best place to start is with the company website.

Even a quick spin through the startup galaxy of websites, and you’ll immediately know there’s a lot of room for improvement in the Customer Experience (CX). Here are three ways you can consider adding to your startup digital marketing strategy planning:

1. Responsive Web Design. More and more, buyers are using mobile devices on the job. If your site wasn’t designed to be usable on multiple devices (PC, tablet, phone) then you’re making a bad impression on potential customers (especially Millennials). Don’t be like 94% of startup companies, who have no mobile strategy in place.
2. HTTPS. If you’re not sure why you should have an ‘S’ on your ‘HTTP’, then you should know that HTTPS is a search engine ranking signal now.  Not only will it help your website appear higher in search results and drive more organic traffic, it will also add the green secure lock icon to the browser. Major browsers will start showing a “not secure” warning to all website visitors in the near future if you don’t have SSL installed, so make sure you configure it soon to avoid a higher bounce rate and lower rankings.
3. AMP. Buyers are busy and as a result, necessarily impatient. If your website isn’t loading fast enough, they’re likely to strike your company off their vendor shortlist. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Presence and if your site doesn’t adhere to AMP best practices, you’re not exactly making the customer journey delightful or easy. Aim for more engagement and a smoother experience with a sound AMP strategy. That means fast-loading pages, quick performing scripts, and form submissions that go through faster than you can say ‘jack rabbit’.

5. Marketing Automation

B2B customers typically use six different channels in their buying journey. Almost two-thirds of them will be frustrated by their experiences.

Since you’re now in the business of ‘delighting’ your customers, you’ll want to upgrade your methods wherever you have a point of contact with your customers and leads. Marketing automation should be a part of your digital making strategy for your startup.

Wherever someone may be along the buyer’s journey, you’ll want to help, coax, encourage, and respond to any actions they’re taking in relation to your business. In fact, a major pain point for 40 percent of surveyed buyers is a slow response time from sales reps. Other frustrations included a sluggish reordering process, which troubled almost a third of survey respondents. Automation can help solve those problems and more by spurring communications, offering helpful links, and tying in customized past ordering data for individual customers.

In essence, what you’re doing is transforming your business into one that’s customer-focused. B2B buyers want the following:

• easier communications
• hassle-free reordering process
• help with product comparison

The added benefit of automating your marketing processes is that it helps with consistent messaging across all your platforms: email, digital ads, and other channels where you interact with your leads and customers.

6. Email Marketing

Another natural outgrowth of a strong startup digital marketing strategy is email marketing: exciting and useful new content is a great excuse for an email newsletter. Email marketing magnifies the power of your content marketing efforts when you use carefully selected content aimed at segmented buyers at specific points along the buying decision timeline.

Plus, to get more out of your content budget, you can reuse content in lots of different ways. For example, you can redirect leads back to your website through your carefully planned email campaigns that include snippets from blog posts on your website that pertain to the moment.

Conclusion

It’s no secret that startup companies are still playing catch-up to B2B and B2C companies in the process of digital transformation and marketing strategy. Having embraced the notion that digitization can lead to growth, startup players who’ve transformed their back-end processes and IT infrastructures should now work with a startup marketing agency on implementing marketing strategies for startups outlined in this post. That’s how they’ll begin to capture and delight their prospects who expect a stellar customer experience, just like what they get in the B2C world. Good luck!

The post Digital Marketing Strategies and Ideas for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, in this guide, we will cover all aspects of the content marketing strategy for technology, startup and software companies: from figuring out your audience to planning your topics to creating conversion devices for your content pieces. Yet, let us first discuss the main differences between B2B and B2C content marketing tactics.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Content marketing, in a nutshell, is how you use content to attract new audience, converting the audience into prospects, and ultimately, into paying customers.

With a proper content marketing, you can establish credibility, a very expensive asset in this saturated digital age. Why? Because simply, people only buy from brands they can trust. If you publish valuable, relevant content regularly, you can establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your industry, which is the principle of inbound marketing.

The main difference between B2C and B2B content marketing planning, obviously, is the audience. With B2C content marketing, you are dealing with personal customers, while with B2B content, you are dealing with businesses, or professionals within the businesses. This main difference will further gives fruit into several important differences, namely:

• B2C audiences are mainly influenced by emotion, while B2B audiences are mainly influenced by logical information, although this is not absolute
• The purchase process of B2B businesses tend to be longer than B2C consumers, meaning, generally you will need more content pieces to nurture a B2B audience
• There can be several different decision-makers in your target companies, and each of them can have different roles with different needs. Your content pieces should address each of these roles, and so B2B content marketing must be more diversified.
• B2C content marketing is more effective for brand awareness purposes, while B2B content marketing plan is more focused towards results (conversion)

Obviously, there are other differences, but these four we have discussed above are the most crucial ones. So, based on those differences, B2B content pieces are required to be more engaging, valuable, relevant, and developed with professional-quality.

Planning and Executing Content Marketing Strategy for Your Technology, Software and Startup Company

Now that we’ve understood the main principles of B2B content marketing, and the differences to B2C content marketing, let us further discuss how to develop a content marketing strategy for technology and software companies.

1. Finding and Understanding Your Audience

It’s impossible to please everyone: our time is limited, our resources are limited, and our manpower is limited. This is why it’s very important to focus on an ideal audience.

Here are some key considerations before we delve further into this subject:

1. Your core value proposition

Remember that people aren’t essentially buying your product or software, but rather the benefits tied to it. Identify the single, most important value about your product or service. If you can define the extra features and benefits, that’s fine, but don’t let these extra features dilute your judgment about the most important benefit.

2. Who would benefit most from that value?

Now that you’ve defined your core value, you will need to find out who, or at least, which companies will benefit the most from this value. For example, if your product is aimed at improving productivity, you might want to target startups with fast-paced growth.

3. Your unique value

What makes your business unique compared to your competitors? What should be the reason your audience will purchase from you and not from your competition? This can be a lower price tag, but remember that your competitor can always lower their price as well. Identify your unique value, and build your business (and content marketing) around it.

Based on those three considerations, here are some targeting approaches you can implement:

• Start by defining your target companies

If you are a B2B technology, startup and software company, your customers will be companies and organizations. List all possible target companies and pick 3 or 5 biggest/most relevant ones. Research these companies thoroughly, especially their key decision-makers.

Each company can have more than one decision-maker, and by studying these key companies, you can have a clearer picture of ideal roles you should target. If possible, segment this audience according to the various stages of the marketing funnel.

• Using analytics and available data

If your brand (and especially site) is not totally new, you should be able to use analytics data to analyze your current visitors. You can use Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics to do this.

Then, you can take notes of the important metrics. You might want to check out this guide by Tech Funnel listing all the important metrics in tracking qualified audiences.

With this data, you can learn a lot about your site visitors, from basic demographics like gender and age, and more in-depth behavior and interest data from the topics they are interested in, what time they are active on your site, what device are they using (mobile/desktop/tablet), and so on.

Understanding this data will be useful not only for your startup content marketing strategy, but for your overall marketing and business strategies you can apply for your tech or software business. Here are some key metrics to observe:

• Demographics: fairly obvious, for example, if your main target audience is millennial women working in California between the age of 25-34, you can figure out how to develop content for this group.

• Behavior: there have been arguments that behavioral targeting is now more important than demographics targeting. The better you can understand your audience’s behavior, the better you can tailor your content. Check out this guide by Google on how to use Analytics to analyze behavior.

• Keywords: analyzing keywords that bring these visitors to your blog/site will be extremely beneficial for your startup digital marketing planning. You can plan out topics to target keywords that have brought results.

• Interest: you can use Google Analytics data to track the social channels that bring visitors to your site. Then you can use the analytics feature on each social media channel to find their interests. You might want to check this guide to learn more about this aspect.

In short, with this approach, we analyze various data of our current visitors and readers to develop better content. Obviously we can’t use this approach if your site is brand new, but you can analyze your closest competitors’ data for a similar effect.

• Developing reader persona

Reader persona, similar to buyer persona, is a fictional model of your ideal reader. So, as opposed to the previous approach where you use the available data to understand your current audience, here you analyze possibilities to create your most ideal future audience.

One way to do this is by analyzing your business and marketing goals, and finding the audience with the highest possibilities in helping you to achieve those goals.

Another approach is to analyze various data, similar to the previous discussion, and use this data to shape your ideal reader. Developing a reader persona can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on developing a data-driven reader persona.

2. Planning Your Topics

One of the biggest challenges in developing a content marketing strategy for tech and startup businesses is consistency. A proper content marketing is not about just one or two high-quality content pages, but you will need to publish a lot of content blogs, articles and pages in various forms, while maintaining consistency in quality.

The best way to tackle this issue is to plan your topics ahead, or better, develop a 6 to 12 months editorial calendar. At the very least, you should aim for two to three content pieces per month. The more the merrier, as long as you can maintain quality.

Here are key steps to consider when planning your topics:

• Keyword research

In this saturated digital marketing world, thousands of content pieces are being published every single day. No matter how good your content is, you won’t get any value from it unless it’s visible to your audience.

One of the best ways to achieve content visibility for software companies is through SEO, and this is why targeting the right keywords is important. In general, you should target keywords that are:

1. Valuable for your business and relevant to what you are offering.
2. Have enough search volume (people are actually searching these keywords).
3. Ranking for these keywords is possible (manageable competition/keyword difficulty).

Then, you can develop topics to target these keywords. You might want to check out our previous guide on keyword research here.

• Social Monitoring

Another indicator you can use in planning your topics is to see the current trends in social media channels: what topics are currently talked about, what’s being shared the most, what’s the popular hashtags, and so on.

There are various marketing tools that can do this, but the most popular one is BuzzSumo. With BuzzSumo, for example, you can collect real-time data from all major social networks according to your industry/niche, and you will be given a list of popular topics with the most traction in your niche.

Using this data, you can either aim to make better content on the topic or use a different approach to cover the topic. Obviously, since you are measuring trends, this approach will be limited to a time frame.

To tackle this, you can first develop a content calendar using the keyword research approach, and use social monitoring to fine-tune it. For example, if you see a topic that was planned for December is trending today in June, you can move it forward. You can also stick to your initial content calendar while developing another content to cover the trend.

• User Intent Prediction

Every activity on the internet from searching to browsing to making a transaction has an intention behind it. This is the concept of user intent, and there are three basic user intent types:

1. Navigational: when you are aiming to get to a specific website
2. Informational: when you are searching for information
3. Transactional: when you are looking to make a purchase

In a B2B sales cycle, it is important to understand that user intent can move progressively according to their position in the sales cycle or marketing funnel. Let’s use an example to illustrate this:

Let’s say you are a marketing manager in a company, and you are currently searching for information on improving your team’s productivity. Your intent here is informational but you are not yet looking for a specific product. Here, a marketing automation tool company can target you with content like “how marketing automation tools can improve productivity”, covering the benefits and main features of marketing automation tools.

Then, after reading the content, you are now interested in buying a marketing automation tool and decided to research your options. Notice your intent has shifted here, and in this stage, content like “best marketing automation tools comparison” can appeal to you.

As you can see, the better you understand the various user intent, the better you can plan your topics. Here are several principles to consider when using this approach:

• The more expensive your product is, the longer your sales cycle will be, and thus generally more people will be involved in the purchase decision
• Understand your sales process, how a typical user usually stumble upon your product and their key considerations until they finally make a the purchase
• Understand the unique values of your product compared to your competitors
• Develop content pieces according to the possible user intents.

3. Validating Your Content

Now that you’ve planned your topics and probably developed a content calendar, it’s time to validate your topics. We all know creating content can be a painful, arduous process. So, we have to make sure our efforts, time, and resources are going to the right ones.

Thankfully, with social media as well as other channels, we can validate our content by using simple social experiments. For example:

• You can create a simple infographic covering a topic, and post in on social media to see number of shares, etc.
• Develop simple, short, but valuable content and post in on social media or over email marketing.
• Use A/B testing to test various aspects of your content from headlines to forms to images and videos.
• Surveys and one-on-one interviews are always effective.

The idea is, don’t blindly produce any content and let your precious time and/or money go to waste. Make sure to focus on topics that actually matter.

4. Planning Content Promotion

Planning and actually developing the content is actually only half the job done. As we have mentioned, excellent content won’t bring value unless people (and ideally, a lot of people) are consuming it.

This is why it is very important to plan how you are going to distribute and promote the content.

As we have discussed briefly above, optimizing your content for B2B SEO with the aim of increasing your organic reach is very effective. However, that’s not the only effective way to promote your content, and here are some tactics you might want to consider:

• Social media marketing

Social media is how many people finding out news, new products, new places, and especially, contents. So, it’s fairly obvious that social media will be a very effective channel for your content promotion.

Take notes, however, that organic social media reach has been in decline for some time now, and you will most likely need to invest on paid social advertising.

• Influencer marketing

The key here is finding the right influencers of the B2B industry you are in, that will align well with your content. Influencer marketing on the B2B environment is still less common than the B2C counterpart, but it can still be very effective when done right.

• Email marketing

You can use email marketing to promote your content, while on the other hand a valuable content can help improve the performance of your email marketing.

The idea here is to deliver the right content, to the right people, at exactly the right time, and we can do it by implementing drip marketing.

5. Planning Conversion Device

Now that your audience is consuming your content, what then? Obviously, for your content pieces to be effective, they must be able to convert your readers, either from readers to prospects or from prospects into actual, paying customers.

There are several different approaches to do this, and here are some of the most effective ones:

• Offering free but valuable, in-depth content in exchange of the user’s contact information (mainly email address), a pretty common but effective tactic
• Offering free-trial of your product, free sample, or discount within the content, using a sense of urgency.
• Using a comprehensive, in-depth content about your product and its unique values to encourage them to purchase. This can be effective, but you will need to find the right balance between being informative and hard-selling.
• Use social proof like testimonies, user reviews, etc. within your content. A common approach is to develop a video highlighting these social proofs.

End Words

The most important aspect of any B2B content marketing plan is finding and understanding your ideal audience: always aim to provide value by offering solutions to their problems or presenting new information to improve their businesses. If you are looking for professional content marketing and SEO check my SEO services for startups.

Remember that the key here is consistency: regularly publish your content pieces, yet maintain the quality. Monitor your progress, evaluate your results, and use the data to develop even better content in the future.

The post Content Marketing Strategy for Technology, Software and Startup Companies to Grow Traffic and Revenue appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Yet, more often than not, startups don’t recognize SEO as an important part of their early marketing strategy. There are many reasons for this: SEO is a long-term game, SEO is difficult to apply or simply not believe that SEO is a valid strategy in 2025.

SEO can be a really effective way to get ahead of the pack, especially in the tough competition of startups. While it’s indeed a long-term game, SEO can act as a strong building block for your startup’s inbound marketing strategy onwards.

In this guide, we will share several effective tips on how to implement SEO for a startup company. Before we begin, let’s discuss the benefits of SEO services for startups.

The Benefits of SEO for Startups

1. SEO is About Content, And Content is King

Your website is the modern-day equivalent to storefront, and is a really important promotional tool for your business. Now, in this competitive, content-driven world, a well-designed website won’t bring you much value without comprehensive, engaging content.

The most common misconception for startup SEO is that we are only optimizing the contents for search engines, while in fact, optimizing for human readers is equally, if not the more important aspect of SEO.

So, by practicing SEO, you will also optimize your content, one of your most valuable marketing assets.

2. SEO is Cost-Effective

Compared to other forms of digital marketing for startups such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and others, SEO for startups is a relatively more affordable option, especially in the long run.

SEO might not have a similar short-term impact as with social media or paid advertising. However, it will be a great long-term foundation for your startup’s online presence. Controlling the budget is always one of the most important aspects of a startup, and investing in a startup SEO campaign is one of the very best bet to grow your startup.

3. Search Engine Has More Market Share Than Ever

We all know that more and more people are searching for reviews and information before deciding on virtually anything nowadays. Google now processes more than 3.5 billion searches daily, and that number continues to grow.

So, skipping on SEO for your startup means you are passing out on this huge market potential. Don’t forget the fact that even more people are going to spend most of their time on their mobile devices. Search engines will be an even bigger pillar of our lives, and without organic SEO, your potential customers will have a hard time finding your business.

The three reasons stated above are not the only ones, as there are many more benefits of practicing SEO for your startup businesses. We could probably even argue that SEO is no longer a luxury marketing strategy for startup businesses, but a necessity.

So, how can we apply the best SEO practices to a startup? For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the steps you will need to take to develop an effective SEO strategy for startup businesses.

Implementing SEO for Startups: The Right Mindset

What’s the first thing that comes into mind when you heard the term ‘SEO’? It can be different for everyone. But many people still think that SEO is about cheating Google and the other search engines to rank higher.

While it may be true in the early 2000s when blackhat SEO is still prominent, it’s actually no longer the case nowadays.

Nevertheless, there are still many misconceptions about startup SEO, and before we begin, we must address at least some of the important ones:

SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme to cheat the search engine

There are, indeed, black hat SEO tactics that can give you short-term results. However, they are very risky and can get you penalized by Google, even got banned from ranking altogether.

Instead, you should change your perception that SEO for startups is a long-term, organic strategy. You might need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before seeing any results, but the results will indeed pay off.

SEO is not always about ranking

Too many startup SEO practitioners are too fixated on getting high search engine rankings, and solely that. Yet, being the first-ranked site won’t mean too much if you don’t get your investments back in the form of traffic, and ultimately, conversion.

But isn’t getting ranked high the way to get traffic? Yes, but not always. There are high-ranking sites with high bounce rates, and so they are losing potential leads. There are also sites with enough traffic, but nobody’s actually buying their products or services.

So, when you set up your startup goal(s) for SEO, avoid fixating too much on ranking, it is just a vanity metric. Instead, focus on your end goals: traffic, conversion and revenue.

SEO is NOT dead

Ah, this is also a common misconception. Almost every year, you will most likely stumble upon an article or two proclaiming the death of SEO, and quite often they are tied to a certain Google algorithm update or another.

Guess what? SEO is still living and breathing, and some might even argue that SEO is stronger than ever. There is, however, some truth in that statement, that SEO is always changing. So, a strategy that works in 2024 might need to change in 2025 and beyond. However, the good news is, as long as you are following the SEO strategy outlined here, you won’t need to worry about doing major changes every time an algorithm update is implemented.

In short, as long as you do SEO best practices, you are fine in the long run.

Step By Step Guide to Implementing SEO for Startups

Step 1: Defining Your Objectives

As discussed above, SERP ranking shouldn’t be the only goal of your startup SEO campaign, as most of the time, it can be misleading as a vanity metric.

Defining a clear and proper SEO objective is very important so you can adjust your priority in implementing the SEO campaign – which as discussed, is a long-term game. Knowing your SEO objectives alone can significantly save time and resources while maximizing ROI.

The general principle is that your SEO objectives should align well with your marketing goals and your startup business’s overall objectives. While the ideal objective(s) might vary depending on many different factors, here are some common SEO goals to consider:

1. Increasing organic traffic: more visitors to your website would equal more opportunities to convert them into prospects and customers.
2. Lead generation for startups: your content should be focused on how you can encourage as many people as possible to submit their contact information (email address). Lead generation should also be a part of your startup customer acquisition strategy.
3. Brand awareness: pretty self-explanatory, getting more people to know your brand by  attracting them to your content
4. Sales: especially if you are an eCommerce business performing direct sales on your site, with this objective you can focus on driving relevant traffic to maximize transactional sales.
5. Customer service: targeting individuals that might need specific help/solution with your content to provide value.
6. Reputation management: ensuring your startup company ranks on top of branded keywords to maintain a positive reputation and ‘bury’ negative content.

Define your objectives, and make sure your objectives are clear, specific, and measurable so you can integrate these objectives in the next steps.

Step 2: Keyword Research

The next thing you will need to work on is finding your target keywords. There are several different approaches to achieve this: you can do a bit of competitive analysis, and look at the keywords your main competitors are targeting. You can also target keywords based on your customer’s behaviors, or other approaches.

Nevertheless, work on your keyword research, and make the full use of the available tools.

In general, there are three main principles in performing your keyword research:

1. Your target keyword should be relevant to your target audience. This is mainly done by measuring the monthly search volume for a specific keyword.
2. The target keyword must be relevant for your brand/product/service. Not all keywords that are popular for your target audience are going to be relevant to your startup business
3. Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for this target keyword must be realistic. The more popular the keyword is, the more competitive it would be. It might not be financially feasible to focus on overly-popular keywords.

Step 3: Content Planning

Next, plan your content based on your target keywords. There was a time when ‘content’ for SEO is just stuffing the keywords into an article, but that is no longer the case. To succeed, you will need to deliver content that gives value to your audience.

Content marketing for SEO is now about the consistent publication (both in quantity and quality) of your content. If you can consistently publish high-quality content, Google will perceive your site as credible and trustworthy and will recommend your content to rank on their SERPs.

It’s very important to understand that although we are developing SEO content, we shouldn’t blindly focus on ‘pleasing’ the search engine, for example by including too many keywords in our content. Instead, the focus should be to provide value for your human readers.

Although content marketing for startups can be a tough subject to discuss, here are some important principles to follow:

• Obviously, the main optimization here is to include your target keywords in the content, and there are two key things to understand:
  • Include your keywords naturally. Again, focus on making the content as comprehensive and natural as possible for your target audience
  • Pay attention to the potential search intent of the keyword, and develop your content to satisfy this search intent
• Do a quick Google search of your target keyword, and check the top-ranking pages. Your aim is to either create better content than these pages or cover the topic from a different angle and create something really unique.
• Optimize your content’s structure both in the eyes of human readers and the search engine’s algorithms. That is, optimize the readability of each content, and maintain a good internal linking structure. Also, implement structured data markup to help with indexing and for your content to be eligible as a rich/featured snippet.

Step 4: Technical Optimization

The next step is to optimize the technical aspect of on-site SEO for startups, and there are two main objectives of this step:

1. To  make sure Google (or the other search engines) can index your site properly and recognize all the different elements on your site correctly
2. To improve the readability and user experience of your content and website in general, with the goal to keep your visitors as long as possible on your site.

Allimitedly, optimizing all the different technical factors can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. You can check our previous guide of technical SEO checklist here, but on this occasion, we will list the important ones you will need to focus on:

• XML Sitemap: Having the proper sitemap is essential so that Google can properly index your site. There are several tools available to achieve this and don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central.
• Title Tags: Include your focus keyword in your title tags, and make it interesting enough for your user to click. Remember that every single title tag must be unique.
• Meta Description: Meta descriptions are not a direct ranking signal. Yet, it will improve your click-through rate (CTR) which is a ranking signal. So, your focus in writing meta descriptions should be your human readers. Make them interesting and unique.
• Heading and Subheading: Not only using proper headings will make the content easier to read, it will also make it easier to sparse by search engines.
• Page load speed: According to Google, if your page loads in more than three seconds, more than 50% of your visitors will bounce. Analyze your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and optimize load speed as much as possible.
• Mobile-friendliness: it’s no secret that nowadays, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive sites to rank on their SERP. Make sure your site is mobile-responsive, and test in as many devices as possible.
• HTTPS: If you haven’t already, make sure to migrate your site to HTTPS rather than HTTP (SSL certificate). Google may block your site in Chrome if you aren’t yet using HTTP.
• Crawl Errors: Use Google Search Console to analyze your site and fix any existing crawl errors.

Also, unless it’s absolutely necessary, avoid using sub-domains in your startup’s website setup. Google might recognize your subdomains as separate entities, and thus will require separate optimizations. It’s better to use subfolders in this case, if you still need the organization’s purpose.

Step 5: Link Building

Now that you’ve done the basics of on-site optimization, it’s time to start moving your focus off-site. Think of it this way: on-site SEO is, essentially, creating content with the right focus keyword and proper structure. Off-site SEO for startups, on the other hand, is putting your content out there and getting people to endorse your content in the form of backlink.

A backlink can be thought of as a vote of confidence on the internet: when a sitel links your page, they are saying that the content on this specific page is trustworthy. However, it’s important to understand that today, the quality of backlinks is more important than quality: a backlink coming from authoritative sites that are relevant to your niche will be worth more than a link from a brand new blog that is totally unrelated to what you sell or do.

However, obviously getting these high-quality backlinks can be easier said than done, but here are a few link building tips you can try:

• The main principle is to create high-quality content: if your content is valuable and well-promoted, you’ll get these backlinks sooner than later. Promote your content using all available marketing channels while aiming to get backlinks in the process.
• Give them a reason to link your content, which can be something like:
  • Unique information/data not available anywhere else, for example in the case of original research report, etc.
  • Data roundup posts where you list a lot of useful data/statistics in a page
  • Aesthetically-pleasing content, like a well-taken photo or infographic
  • An original, attractive story
• Collaborate with other websites on your niche/industry, the more influential they are, the better.
• Be active on your social media channels, and frequently link to quality contents
• If you are a brick and mortar startup, build your local citations and reviews. Check the detailed guide on link building for startups and my SEO services for startup companies.

Step 6: Evaluate and Re-optimize

The last (but not least) step here is to evaluate your SEO progress so far and make the necessary adjustment.

Since, again, startup SEO is a long-term project, then monitoring your progress is a very important thing to do, and most likely you’ll need to make adjustments and re-optimization along the way. Especially evaluate the following metrics:

• Ranking: pretty obvious, even though you haven’t reached the top spots or even the first page of SERP yet, you should check if your page is moving upwards the SERP gradually
• Organic traffic: in general, your site’s organic traffic should go hand-in-hand with your increase/decrease in ranking. If, for example, your ranking goes up but you have a decline in organic traffic, then you should check the other metrics for possible issues
• Conversion rate: the ‘conversion’ here would vary depending on your site, it can be email signups, form submissions, or even transactions.
• Link profile: check for new backlinks and referring domains, also check you competitors’ link profile to find link building opportunities and possible gaps in your strategy
• Local metrics: if you are also implementing local SEO (i.e. if you are a brick and mortar startup business), then you should check metrics like Google Maps ranking, number of local citations, session location, and so on

Adjust your strategy based on the evaluation, and don’t forget to check the latest startup SEO trends and updates, especially algorithm updates. Don’t be afraid to update or even revamp your content if necessary, for example if you can include more up-to-date information. In fact, Google tend to prioritize fresh content in its SERP.

End Words: Do’s and Don’ts

Implementing SEO for startups might not be a simple task, especially if you are completely new to SEO. However, by following our step-by-step above, you will have a strong building block on your journey ahead. Choosing the right SEO service is just as important as selecting the best LLC service. Each is the foundation of your online business.

To close this guide, we will share several do’s and don’ts as you start implementing your SEO.

Do’s:

• Track your progress, and pivot when necessary
• Put professional SEO consultant in charge of your strategy, or outsource it to an agency
• SEO is always changing. So, keep yourself up-to-date with the latest tactics and knowledge base

Don’ts:

• Duplicate content, or keyword-stuffed content
• Never pay for links, ever
• Never build links with spammy methods: forum comments, blog comments, posting on low-quality sites

The post The Step-By-Step Guide to SEO for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.