Marketing is the way any business gets exposure for its brand with customers. But did you know that startups need it more than established businesses?

Known brands already have awareness among customers, on the other hand startups need more aggressive marketing strategy to be found by their audience. Without it, the business may not survive its first year.

Startups usually have limited budget for marketing since most of the business’ budget goes into product development and branding. And that’s why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most suitable marketing strategy to use.

SEO 101: How to Drive Organic Traffic to Your Website

Customers often discover brands when they perform a search on Google or other search engines, then come across a brand that suits their needs in the results.

Most of the time, people focus on the first few links on the first page of the search results, which means any links beyond that are getting far less attention. Websites that appear low on the first page or on subsequent pages are less likely to get a click.
Because of this, ranking high on the search results page is essential to generating organic traffic. SEO not only boosts organic traffic, but it requires zero ad expenses – just hard work and patience. Hence why SEO is the most recommended marketing strategy for startups or small businesses.

Discover the best practices for SEO to boost organic traffic for your startup. But let’s quickly define…

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a tactic to optimize the quality and quantity of organic traffic to a website from the search engine results pages. Organic Traffic is unpaid traffic (meaning traffic you get for free) without paying for ads, affiliates or anything similar. Organic Traffic are website visits that may come from articles, web copy, videos, blogs, or other online content.

For Example:

A student driver may perform a search to find an online permit test resource in Maryland. When the results come up, they’re likely to click on the top links. If Zutobi appears on the search results and gets clicked, that drives traffic to their site.

Google then sees that the user found what they were looking for with the search. Verifying that the result is correct, Google remembers this and shows Zutobi again on other similar searches further driving traffic to their site.

What Does SEO Do for a Startup?

SEO is necessary for brand awareness, especially for a new business.

1. Cost-Effective Traffic

Most startups have limited marketing budgets and can’t afford to dump a ton of money into paid advertising or influencer marketing like a large company. SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for startups. All it takes is time and a small portion of the marketing budget, and the spend goes a long way. With the right SEO strategy, you can get an incredible ROI.

2. Brand Awareness

High search rankings are one of the top ways to get discovered by the target audience. As more people learn of your brand and what you have to offer, you can gain more paying customers. Many people find brands when they’re searching for solutions to a problem, such as how to install a water heater. When your brand shows up in the results and provides a solution, they’re more likely to remember you and recommend you to others.

Quick Tip:

Make sure your domain name matches your business name (e.g. www.webbroi.com) . It’s a no-brainer but not everyone gets to have the domain name they want. But what if .com is not available?

You can use .org or .net as alternative. But make sure you get your domain name from reliable domain name providers.

3. Positive User Experience

User experience refers to the feeling a user gets when they interact with a brand or its products whether positive or negative. Also, the ease with which a user can navigate a page or site has a huge impact on their overall impression. User experience isn’t a component of SEO, but certain aspects, such as fast load times and a mobile-friendly site, have a positive impact on user experience.

4. Brand Authority

Brand authority is the trust customers have in a brand. This can be gained through consistent, positive experiences or by viewing the brand as an industry expert. If the customer has a problem or question, your brand is who they go to in order to find solutions. When your content shows up at the top of the search results page, your customers will come to view your brand as an authority in the industry.

How to Use SEO to Boost Traffic

Here are some SEO strategies that can help you generate organic traffic for your startup.

1. Refine the Target Audience

Traffic is wonderful, but it does little for your business if it comes from people who don’t want or need what you have to offer. It’s better to attract high-quality traffic from your target audience - which are the people who’re most likely to purchase your products or services in the future.

So narrow your focus to a relevant audience to generate traffic that’s likely to come back in the future to purchase your products or services.

Here are some questions to ask to determine your target customers.

• What are my customer’s pain points?

• What am I trying to solve?

• What are my ideal audience’s demographics?

• How can I use content to help my customers?

2. Opt for Low-Hanging Keywords

Low-hanging keywords are keywords that already have a good ranking on a search engine results page and low competition. Use these keywords to help your content get rankings on the first few pages, since they’re proven to perform well.

Another excellent option for SEO are longtail keywords. Longtail keywords are keywords which use phrases instead of words. You can use these phrases, which are often questions like “What’s the best keywords for SEO service?” or “Top tips for better blog content”, to develop your content.

There are tools (mostly paid) you can use to find these keywords. But you can always research keywords online to find the best ones for your audience.

3. Work on Technical SEO

Perhaps because it’s technical that it often gets neglected. However, Technical SEO is an important part of the SEO strategy because it ensures that search engines, like Google, understand you content and assign the appropriate value or ranking on their search results.

Because a Search Engines’ task is to provide the most correct or relevant content to a search query, it reads your website's content first to know what kind of content you have and what keywords should it display to.

In simple terms, it’s how you make sure that search engines display your content to your target audience.

Here are some ways to improve your technical SEO:

• Include a schema markup

• Optimize your content for mobile

• Audit your page speed and load times

• Fix performance issues as you come across them

4. Position Yourself as an Authority

Differentiating your brand from your competitors is a must during a startup’s first year. Positioning yourself as an authority in the industry builds your foundation as a trusted source and draws visitors to you. If you provide value to search engines, they will prioritize your content.

So make sure to focus on your expertise and share information that you think will help your audience.

5. Stay Consistent

A startup company or business can be a chaotic place, with the founder and most employees wearing many hats and juggling all the different day-to-day responsibilities. Thus, incorporating SEO in your marketing strategy can be challenging. Nevertheless, it’s important if you want long-term success.

Stay consistent with your efforts and focus on providing content on a regular basis even if you can only manage one or two posts a week.

Schedule your content and posts ahead of time so you stay consistent. It’s better to publish or post weekly with shorter contents than posting long contents sporadically. Because over time, your audience will learn to expect new content from you and look forward to it.

6.Be Patient

If you want to get traffic quickly, paid advertising is great. But it can be quite expensive depending on the size of your target audience and the keyword you’re targeting since the more generic the keyword is, the more people will be bidding for that space.

For Example:

A a car rental ad costs more to show to an audience of men and women above 18 compared to an audience of just men above 18. In the same way, the same car rental ad costs more to show when the keyword “car rental” is searched compared to the keyword “car rental in Maryland under $1000”.

That’s why organic traffic (unpaid traffic) is generally recommended for startups and small businesses. It’ll take some work but with the right attitude, it’ll give you great results for less the money you spent, if any.

SEO is cheap and boasts incredible ROI, but it doesn’t happen fast. It takes time and patience to develop a solid SEO strategy and reap the rewards.

Start Driving Organic Traffic with SEO

As the online market gets more saturated, the more you’ll need SEO as part of your marketing strategy. However, with the SEO strategies and tips provided you should be able to devise a solid plan to deliver optimized content that drives traffic and growth to your website.

Remember the 6 SEO steps used to boost organic traffic:

1. Refine your target audience;

2. Opt for low hanging keywords;

3. Work on Technical SEO;

4. Position your business as an authority;

5. Stay consistent;

6. Be patient

Use these 6 SEO steps as a guide when making an SEO strategy and start driving traffic to your website.

Cheers!

About the Author

Tim Waldenback is the co-founder of Zutobi, a gamified e-learning platform focused on online drivers education to help teens get their license. Tim founded Zutobi to make world-class driver's education fun, affordable, and easily accessible for all.