Every startup owner needs a solid strategy to succeed. SEO is integral for every business strategy in 2021. Startups need it to grow online by increasing visibility and amassing bigger audiences. But then, not every entrepreneur takes SEO seriously. This hurts their startups’ growth in return.
Entrepreneurs need to understand how the internet can help them establish their businesses. According to Business Insider, the internet has levelled the playing field for startups to contend with big companies.
This means startups can build a name on search engines and get worldwide traction just as much as their bigger competitors.
With SEO, business people can lay online foundations for their startups and increase their chances of success. This article explores why startups should put SEO tactics at the core of their strategies. As a startup owner, it will help you understand the hidden benefits of SEO.
We strongly recommend that startups need SEO tactics to get surprise growth result in 2021.
Let’s get started.
1. Get the Best Customer Analysis
Understanding your customers is critical to meeting their needs. However, startups require some time to get acquainted with their audiences – that is where SEO comes along. It uncovers crucial data that helps startups understand their audiences’ behaviors and create accurate customer personas.
There are different SEO strategy for businesses to gather this data over time. As a startup, you can use this data to know your target audience’s searches online and the pain points they want to be addressed by businesses. It also boosts keyword research, which is a cornerstone for every good SEO strategy.
Google has some of the best SEO tools in its Google Analytics 360 suite. They track your web traffic and collect insightful data, including age, gender, and geographical location. This then provides a holistic view of your marketing efforts. The insights then help you take action to improve your business.
2. Increase Traffic and Conversion Rates
There are billions of active internet users in the world today. According to Statista, 92.05% of these people use Google for online searches as of February 2021. This shows that Google undoubtedly dominates the search engine market. Every startup that wants to go online needs to ensure it is visible on Google.
Good SEO can make your business noticeable to this massive Google community. It will help you increase traffic to your website and, in the end, yield higher conversion rates and more revenue. As a startup, this tells you why you need to prioritize SEO among other digital marketing strategies.
You can anticipate better conversion rates from SEO because it is great for inbound marketing. Unlike traditional marketing tactics that are intrusive, SEO targets an audience interested in what a business does.
Good SEO will help your business only appear on relevant searches and make it easy for your prospects to reach out to you.
3. Marketing at A Low Cost
One of the leading entrepreneurs’ dilemmas is how much should a startup spend on marketing. Well, there is no hard and fast rule on what should be a startup’s allocation to SEO. However, most startups do not make consistent revenue, making it difficult to allocate a lot of money to market their brands.
Thankfully, SEO is not that expensive, and it can potentially even be free. The amount a startup spends depends on its revenue and SEO needs.
According to the U.S Small Business Administration, startups with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing.
After allocation, the next thing should be to spend your budget wisely. One of the best ways to do this is by hiring a startup marketing agency to help with all their marketing needs. These marketing agencies know the ins and outs of how to market small businesses.
The experiences that marketing agencies have helps them manage everything a startup needs to market itself. This includes SEO, SEM, Email marketing, influencer marketing, etc. They tailor these strategies for startups and implement them at relatively affordable costs.
4. Make Informed Business Decisions
As mentioned earlier, SEO helps businesses collect a lot of insightful data. Startups can use this data to make critical business decisions for the present and future.
For instance, you can decide what content best fits your audience, the products, and services to push more, and changes that can propel growth.
You can also use SEO data for keyword analysis. It can help you determine the keywords that aren’t doing well and replace them with high-ranking ones. Besides, it also allows you to understand the customer’s journey on your website which helps you know where to place things like CTAs.
In short, this data shapes every decision that an entrepreneur makes. These decisions, in the end, affect the amount of traffic they generate and their conversion rates. Thus, entrepreneurs need to appreciate the vital role SEO plays in decision-making.
5. Strengthen Customer Trust
Customer trust is a very vital element to every small or large business. But then, we all know that it naturally takes a while to build trust, especially as a startup. People can trust your brand if you present it as an industry authority in a specific field.
As a startup, you cannot do this without any help. SEO is an excellent tool that will help you strengthen customer trust. As mentioned earlier, good SEO helps your business climb the search engine result pages to appear on the first page where most users concentrate.
Potential customers will trust you if your business appears on the first page. This is because Google recommends you as an industry authority by ranking you among the top. This will have a significant impact on your web traffic and also boost your business’ conversion rates.
6. Build Long-Term Audiences
Building a trusting online audience can be a daunting task. Being sure that the audience will stick around for a long time is another challenge. It is vital to find the best ways to build long-term audiences that will benefit your business in the future.
As mentioned earlier, paid ads do not help you do that, but good SEO does. Startups need to invest more time and effort into making their websites get excellent and steady traffic flow. Unlike ads that end after some time, traffic drawn with good SEO practices won’t stop for years.
If you rank for the right keywords, it may take a lot from your competitors to beat you. Besides, you can continue growing your audience with a change in tactics. SEO helps you find the best strategies for building better audiences.
7. Better Brand Awareness
Many startups unnecessarily handle SEO and brand building separately. However, this can have severe impacts on either startup branding or SEO because they are better combined. To avoid a disconnection between the two, infuse one into another. This will also mean that you won’t have to double your efforts.
SEO plays a significant role in startup branding. It helps you create content for the audience that you’d like to target. Niche targeting makes it possible for businesses to connect with their audiences. This includes enhancing keyword research which makes their content more relevant.
These are several benefits of good business branding. More people become aware of your brand, increasing your traffic, and consequently improving your startup’s revenues.
8. Enjoy Long-Lasting Results
Many startups do not want to take the long yet most rewarding route. They pay for ads to appear on the first page of search engine results. But paid ads can be expensive for a small business considering they are short-term solutions. Audiences can also disregard them, making them less effective.
Conversely, working your way up has several long-lasting results. As mentioned before, SEO is primarily free, and unlike ads that last as long as your budget for them does, it is independent. You can keep optimizing your website and following the best SEO practices and still get the desired results.
This makes SEO a more feasible strategy for startups looking for growth. Factors such as competition, content, and links will determine how soon you reap results from SEO. But then, once you do, the results will be worth all the effort you put into it.
Closing Thoughts
The truth is that good SEO takes a lot of time and effort. However, it is cheap and comes with lots of profitable rewards, making it worthwhile. As a startup owner, you need to implement good SEO to enhance your businesses’ marketing efforts and boost your ROI.
Most people do not bother to check the second page of search results. This means businesses need to put enough effort to get to the first page and get the most organic traffic. As mentioned earlier, startups have an equal chance on search engines, and it is the effort put in that pays off in the long run.
If you are thinking about building a startup, SEO should not be an afterthought. You need to think about it in the planning process for the best results. The insights in this article explain why every startup needs to develop and implement an SEO strategy. It will help you keep up with SEO best practices.