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It is estimated that there are more than 800,000 startup businesses in the U.S. every single year. The challenge for any business, whether it’s a startup or an established company is to make certain that when people are online looking for the right product or service, they find yours instead of that of a competitor. 

The key to making that happen is a good Startup SEO Strategy. After all, you’re competing for organic traffic against hundreds of other established companies, so making sure they find you are an absolute must. 

What can you do to make that happen? These five tips can help. 

1. Focus on Your Readers: 

One of the best SEO practices you’ll ever find doesn’t really relate to SEO at all. Instead, it relates to your target audience - those who will actually engage with your brand and purchase your product. Optimizing for your readers is absolutely essential. 

Begin by creating good buyer personas so you know how to create content real people might actually consume. From there, develop content around your products and services that is specifically designed to help, answer questions, and meet their needs, not just sell your products or attract the attention of search engines. 

You may want to start a regular blog, take up a guest blog space on a space or in a publication they might view with regularity, or create shareable content that meets their needs. This one single step will help you optimize your site better than any other step ever could. 

2. Understand Keywords: 

There is quite a bit to select the right keywords to incorporate into your content, so it can be fairly complex. Many people select the most popular keywords and move forward. That’s not necessarily going to help your startup achieve the organic traffic numbers you really want. 

Instead, you’ll want to really understand keywords, how they work, and how you can rank for the ones your customers might be using. Keywords come in two basic forms - shorter keywords and long-tail keywords. 

Shorter keywords are highly competitive, and they’re tough to rank for. These are things like “attorney.” You’ll want to identify these and use some of them throughout your site, but they shouldn’t be your primary focus. 

Instead, that should go to long-tail keywords. This might be “personal injury attorney'' or “personal injury attorney for car accidents.” 

Google will be more likely to rank your website highly for long-tail keywords, and customers using keywords like those are more likely to be further down the sales funnel when they finally reach you. 

3. Don’t Forget the Technical Aspects: 

Optimizing your startup’s website isn’t just about what potential customers might see on the page. Instead, it’s also about what’s lurking behind the page. This means addressing things like your tags - meta titles, URLs, and descriptions. 

This is fairly easy, particularly if you’re using something like an SEO plugin behind the scenes. That’s not your only concern, though. You’ll also want to make certain that your site is structured in a way that it’s easy to navigate both for bots and people alike. Additionally, ensure your pages load quickly and effectively, as a slow load time could affect your ranking. 

Page load time is an increasingly important ranking factor, so make certain you’re optimizing every aspect to be sure it loads well on any screen from mobile to desktop and everything in between. 

4. Build Your Reputation:  

You’ll also want to do some brand building throughout the web. This can mean creating a solid social media presence with plenty of followers, but it may also mean developing press releases as they come about, responding to comments and reviews across the web, and becoming a thought leader in your industry. 

Your brand reputation is how people understand your organization and these days, you’ll want to be sure that any time your brand is discussed, it’s positive. Take every opportunity to do an interview, network with others, create original research, and plan ahead. Additionally, remain focused on the ideal customer experience again and again. That focus will be evident in every single user review. 

5. Take Advantage of the Metrics: 

You’ll want to make sure your efforts are paying off, and the best way to do that is to ensure that you’re looking at Google Analytics or a similar data dashboard to know what’s working for your optimization strategy and what isn’t. 

There are literally thousands of data points when it comes to SEO, and knowing what to measure and what makes sense for your company can be difficult, but it’s essential. Tracking the right metrics means improving your overall results and creating a focused plan moving forward. 

The best SEO practices are those that work for your startup, but they can be overwhelming if you are unsure of how to attain your SEO strategy goals. Luckily, there are professionals who can help. Our SEO professionals are here to help your startup hit the ground running and reach the goals you’ve set out to achieve.