Owning a business is becoming easier every day, but growing one not so much. Consider the ample competition companies face nowadays, combined with the constantly changing customer behavior and preferences, and you have quite a conundrum on your hands. Now factor in the simple truth that startups are not just any ordinary companies. Startups need to be edgy, innovative, ahead of their time, and above all, profitable in order to sustain their advanced solutions for the many customers they wish to impress. For all of those reasons, SEO – Search Engine Optimization, remains one of the pillars of creating a successful business in the digital age.
Your startup needs to have a prominent digital presence, a strong ranking, and unparalleled digital marketing campaigns to earn that spotlight. Here are a few whys to support your SEO investments, and how you can make them work in your startup’s favor.
Ranking higher for better CRO
Kick-starting a business in any industry is a challenge, but some niches are more competitive than others. For example, when you’re looking into how to start up a construction company, you quickly discover that in addition to intricate rules, regulations, and legal prerequisites, your business needs to have a powerful digital presence to even stand a chance – even though the actual service is very much offline in nature.
Even in such industries, SEO allows startups to rank higher, reach more qualified leads, boost their website traffic, and ultimately bring more happy customers your way. Without SEO, conversion rate optimization is not even a possibility.
Increase your brand authority and credibility
While many companies invest in short-term marketing to reap the benefits immediately, startups also need to plan at least those three steps ahead to truly earn their customers’ trust. The term SEO might focus on search engines, but your customers are the ones dictating what search engines reward, like, and trust. However, this is why SEO is a part of your long-haul marketing game for better brand positioning – SEO helps you reach the top of the search results and stay there only if you provide the search engines (that is, your customers) the reason to do so.
That means years of consistent and quality content output, technical optimization, blogger outreach, etc. To achieve that, many startups choose to partner up with a white label SEO company in order to take care of their long-term SEO needs. That way, startups can focus on what they do best (innovation), and leave their ranking in the most professional of hands to build up their long-term authority in the industry and retain their ranking for greater customer trust.
Brand positioning for the long term
At one point in time, certain keywords are all the rage, and your entire customer base searches for those specific phrases to find your services, and your competitors, too. Over time, those phrases will change. For example, people now use voice search to ask complex, complete questions, instead of only relying on the few, grammatically incomplete phrases to find their next favorite pair of shoes. Likewise, search engines recognize these patterns and change their own priorities when ranking brands. Now that people are using their phones so frequently, Google has made your site’s mobile version its primary one for ranking – and the examples keep piling up.
Such behavioral changes help you restructure your SEO strategy well enough to slowly adapt your content, your on and off-site approaches, and ultimately preserve your position in the SERPs. Your startup’s position will only be protected for as long as you know how to stay ahead of the SEO game.
Understanding your customers
In addition to regular optimization, keyword research, and learning about algorithm changes (all of which changes how you handle your SEO needs over time), SEO also has another, the post-campaign element of analytics. It serves to bring you the knowledge and data on how well your campaigns are evolving, if you’re getting through to enough people, and if you should consider making changes.
Different SEO tools continuously collect customer behavior data to give you a clearer view of what they want and need. Without this kind of information, all of your other marketing tactics would be rendered useless, so your ongoing SEO fuels your entire digital presence.
Among many other aspects of your digital marketing, SEO remains a key piece of the puzzle that will bring you more success. No matter how creative you are with your unique value proposition and the product or service you’re offering, without proper SEO, few people will ever get the chance to see or experience your brand – all the more reason to put your startup on the digital map with the right strategy up your sleeve.
