Simple SEO Tips for Startups Looking to Optimize Your Website’s Informational Content

As a startup, you need all the inexpensive and effective traffic boosts you can get. But it’s easy to get distracted by all the things you need to do instead of focusing on what will have the most benefit to your business: SEO. 

Search engine optimization is the single most effective way to organically saturate your market and generate traffic. This is how you will build brand awareness, create a positive user experience, as well as increase your brand authority or industry credibility.

Startups have a little more to prove than industry vets.  Your website content should be an informative, clean, client-converting machine. And SEO can help you get there. Here are a few SEO tips to optimize your website’s informational content. 

Target One Audience

It’s in Google’s job description to serve up the best quality content for their searchers. They’re also equally concerned about ensuring a positive and seamless user experience. As a search engine, it will promote content that serves those purposes and appears to offer valuable insights and education. 

The algorithm will analyze millions of websites, if not more when performing a search. It’s looking for specific results to provide the best options. Your content and your website should be created to match Google’s primary objectives. 

To make the algorithm work for you, you have to target a specific audience in your informational content. General traffic is great but if it’s not truly a good match for who you’re trying to reach, this will hurt you in the end as the algorithm sees folks leaving too quickly.

This tells Google your site isn’t actually a good match for the search performed. When you laser in on precisely who you serve, this helps you create a message that matches with keywords and phrases they use. 

If you don’t have a defined target audience or customer avatar, here are a few questions to ask in order to establish one right away.

• What are their demographics?
• What problem are you trying to solve?
• What future do they envision?
• What are their obstacles?
• How can you create content that helps your customers?

Don’t Waste Your Budget On Spendy Keywords

Keywords, long tail keywords, and key phrases are what make up your “on-page SEO.” Keywords that have a strong ranking on the SERP (search engine results page) but that also have low competition are known as “low-hanging keywords.” In other words, aim low. 

Rather than creating content that is aiming for pricey keywords and phrases, reverse engineer your content based on the applicable low-hanging keywords. Work smarter not harder!

Conduct comprehensive research to find the words and phrases that will work for your audience. Long Tail keywords have a stronger SEO impact and are often posed as questions. This is an easy way to inform your content creation plan while still enhancing your search engine optimization. 

A content-driven strategy will be far cheaper than a “cost-per-click” strategy or paid advertising. However, it won’t offer immediate results. As a startup, you need to establish credibility, not just get leads. 

Be patient as you develop and deploy your SEO strategy. It will be more targeted, more effective, and more beneficial to your company long term. 

Leverage Social Media Content

Social media platforms are their own type of search engine. Leverage your keyword-infused content on social media in addition to your website. Even if you don’t have a massive following, the potential for discovery is still high, especially with keywords, hashtags, and video content. 

This keeps your business in front of your target audience and shows that you’re “in it” and involved. You’re paying attention to their market, and the industry, and you’re active. All of these things work to enhance your brand image and authority. 

For this to work, you have to be consistent and focus on providing content regularly. When you post to your website or update pages, share it on social media. Break up long-form content into a bite-sized series, each directing viewers to the longer version on your website.

Two posts a week should be the minimum, more is better. Don’t overthink it! Batch content creation for the week or month into one day and pre-schedule it using any one of the many helpful social media management tools. 

Perfect Website Technical SEO

Technical SEO is deeper than just metadata and image descriptions, though those are essential. Your website’s technical SEO settings and enhancements improve the value of your content in the eyes of the algorithm. 

This element is often neglected by startups who want a “beautiful” website. Your website is a tool that must be sharpened before it works well. Here is where to start perfecting your technical SEO.

Create A Schema Markup

A schema markup shows the algorithm and all the search bots, everything that’s included in your website based on the structured data vocabulary. 

Optimize Content For Mobile Viewing

Billions of people on this planet have a smartphone in their hands nearly 24/7. You might be reading this on your phone! Optimizing your content to be easily digestible on a mobile device is critical to creating a positive user experience, which is one of Google’s primary objectives. 

Check Page Load Times and Functional Speed

Google offers a free tool, PageSpeed Insights, to check your page loading speed and overall performance. It will outline the “Opportunities” you have for improvement so you can easily make the necessary adjustments.

Internal Links and Backlinks

Collaborate with industry partners and vendors to build your online thought leadership presence and generate links to each other’s content. This is an easy way to send the AI bots a signal that your content is valuable and accurate. 

Easily Optimize Your Website’s Informational Content!

With the growth of the internet and the sheer number of websites online, SEO will always remain a strong element of your marketing and content strategies moving forward. As a startup, the time to begin optimizing was yesterday! 

These SEO tips should help you develop a plan so you can deliver high-quality content and grow your organic traffic.