SEO for early-stage startups: 6 steps to grow on a budget

If you’re just launching your startup, you’ll have a lot on your plate, including determining market fit, researching your target audience, developing feasible marketing strategies, etc. However, everything begins with building a website, as no one will find you if you are not visible. When it comes to establishing an online presence, we eventually consider SEO.

Despite the fact that search engine optimization is a lengthy process, you should get started from day one if you want to reap the benefits of free traffic and almost automatic growth in the future.

If you’re running an early-stage startup on a shoestring budget, it’s definitely worth investing in Google-friendly website optimization. To avoid blowing your budget, it’s important to develop a strategy based on industry best practices and constantly improve your SEO score.

Fortunately, you aren’t alone. There are a lot of free resources available to help you get started in the right direction. One of them is this article.

Continue reading to discover the top 6 steps for SEO for startups, based on expert advice and best practices.

Why should early-stage startups invest in SEO?

People are constantly looking for the best products or services online. SEO can assist them in locating your services. Even the representatives of Good say – “People look for a product first, not for you.” Before your brand is recognized, people will need to search for [your brand name] and find you through general search queries. 

Let’s enumerate the main benefits of investing in search engine optimization for early-stage startups.

Free traffic

Startup owners are always on the lookout for the cheapest ways to promote their products, but at the same time, they need results. What about obtaining qualified leads for free? Yes, that’s what every business needs and SEO is a good way to build a lead generation channel.

SEO is not free, as time and resources must be invested in creating optimized content and outbound promotion. However, once the flow starts, you will not have to pay for every impression, click, or lead, as with paid advertising campaigns.

Influence over a large number of marketing funnels

The hidden power of search engine optimization lies in its ability to boost other marketing efforts and influence different stages of your integrated marketing funnels.

For instance, creating great educational content that is search engine optimized is essential to your inbound marketing strategy. Your audience needs your help to learn your product or service better and faster, obtain advice related to your niche, etc. Internal linking within your blog allows you to recommend useful resources to your readers and build loyalty.

Working on SEO for your startup’s website will impact every phase of your marketing funnel.

Brand awareness and credibility

Before ordering a specific product or service in today’s digital world, everyone relies on online proofs. A great website and blog are essential for growing your startup credibility and being recognized as a leader in your niche.

For example, if you respond to users’ queries via blog content in an expert and comprehensive way, they will begin to recognize your brand and consider your startup a great solution for specific needs.

SEO can help you grow your business online in 6 simple steps

1. Focus on the basics

Because early-stage startups usually don’t have a large SEO budget, it’s critical to divide the resources as evenly as possible. Concentrate your efforts on the most important things, such as creating content, ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly, and ensuring no technical SEO issues.

Do you recall the Pareto Principle? It states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts. So, the first step in starting your SEO process is defining and focusing on the fundamentals that will lead to that percentage of effective efforts.

You can expand your SEO activities and grow more quickly with a larger budget.

2. Define goals and craft a feasible strategy

Obviously, the primary goal of search engine optimization is to generate organic traffic from search engines and convert online leads into customers. However, this end goal should be broken down into specific steps to achieve the desired results.

Setting SEO goals entails thinking about what you want to achieve and how to achieve the KPIs. Ahrefs, a well-known SEO tool, suggests envisioning SEO goals as a pyramid.

Source – https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-goals/ 

Begin with small goals and work your way up

For example, for early-stage startups, you could set the following SEO goals for the first 3-6 months:

Increase organic traffic to 2K+ unique monthly visitors. 

How to reach: fix technical issues, optimize meta descriptions, properly gather semantic data, and create SEO optimized content.

How to measure: data in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or rank tracking tools, like Semrush or Wincher, can be used.

3. Find the resources

To make your SEO strategy a reality and begin receiving organic traffic, you need to consider the available resources and allocate a budget for specific actions.

Speaking about resources, there are three elements:

Human resources

According to the goals and tests you set up in the previous paragraph, you should consider dividing responsibilities among your colleagues or hiring freelancers or part-time employees to get the job done.

It’s always a good idea to have an inbound content manager run a blog because this person will be fully devoted to the startup and will understand the product better.

Consider hiring a part-time employee to help with keyword research and off-page SEO. You’ll save money while covering all of the SEO basics.

Budget

Unless your startup has a consistent huge revenue stream, your budget for search engine optimization is limited. Invest 10-20% of your overall budget in SEO. If the KPIs and pull of efforts are chosen correctly, it will eventually pay off and bring you a consistent flow of leads and profit.

SEO tools

I wouldn’t recommend purchasing expensive SEO tools at once for early-stage startups, especially if you can hire a freelancer or part-time employee to handle basic SEO stuff. They usually have their own tools for conducting keyword research or performing SEO audits. 

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the first platforms you should set up. There is no need to invest money in these Google products because they are free. But they are indispensable if you want to remain aware of your SEO results and measure online performance.

You can also look for a keyword rank tracker. It will give you accurate information about your search engine rankings and content marketing results.

If you want to start SEO at an advanced level, consider buying Semrush or SimilarWeb subscriptions. They will provide you with a huge range of data, needed to analyze your competitors, conduct research, and measure the performance of your website.

Technical SEO

It’s crucial to get your technical SEO in order before you start working hard on outbound promotion for your business and investing in a blog.

Check that Google can find, understand, and index your pages. Otherwise, all of your efforts to rank will be futile.

Conduct keyword research and begin creating content

This is, in my opinion, one of the most important points. Because conducting proper keyword research and selecting the appropriate semantic for your web pages and blog is the foundation of a long “friendship” with Google.

Find the right key phrases you want to rank and optimize each web page to improve your SEO. It is important to investigate how people search for what you do, their intentions, and so on. Here’s a good resource for beginners to learn the basics of keyword research.

Basic link building

Link building is the process of getting links from external sources to your website. It’s important to build your domain authority and amplify all the other SEO efforts. 

I must admit that this part of link building is pretty complicated for beginners. It requires enough knowledge and practical skills. 

Consider free options such as guest posting (contributing to other blogs with your own piece of content) and HARO to start earning backlinks for your website (providing your expert quotes to journalists)

Conclusion

Search Engine Optimization is an investment that will definitely pay off. It won’t happen overnight, but consistent efforts to improve your online visibility will increase brand awareness, free organic traffic, build brand identity, and amplify all your marketing efforts.

If you are on the lookout for a reliable way to scale your early-stage startup, start working on SEO for your business website right away.