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If your business is less than a year old and in the startup stages, you know just how important any kind of marketing can be for your company. For most today, though, digital marketing is absolutely key. With most consumers looking online before they ever purchase a product or service, ensuring your company is as visible online as possible is nothing short of an absolute must. 

For many, this means creating a vibrant SEO strategy that will help your site get in front of more eyes quickly, but if you’re new to the world of Search Engine Optimization or Digital Marketing, you may not know where to begin. This quick guide can help. 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Optimization considers a number of variables, such as your audience, to help you correctly target and reach your audience with strategic accuracy, relevancy, and value of information. 

These seemingly obvious considerations are often overlooked, however, it is imperative in order to ensure search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) can crawl, rank, and gauge whether your site meets user intent. In short, create for your audience - but keep optimization at top of mind. 

Your site’s page rank, or where it appears in the Google search pages when a customer types a relevant query, is determined by the search engine itself. Optimizing your content for search and your audience is a great foundation for your SEO strategy. 

What Do I Do First?

Your SEO strategy should begin when you define your goals. After all, you’re pretty busy with product development, team development, and all of the other tasks any startup must consider. Defining your goals will go a long way toward helping you deliver the SEO strategy that works for you. 

Your goals should be reasonable and achievable. You’re not going to take the number one spot on Google away from a giant like Macy’s, even if you do have a well-developed fashionable clothing line, but there are things you can do. Maybe you’d like to ensure the search traffic for a set of specific keywords belongs to you, in which case you may want to start with quarterly topic clusters to create a plan for conquering the keywords you want. 

Perhaps you want to be sure customers spend more time on your website so they can really get to know your brand or you want to increase the conversion rate. When you define your goals, your strategy will really begin to fall into place. This will help you identify gaps, fill them and move forward accordingly.

As you define your goals, don’t forget to think about your budget. It can cost you anywhere between a few hundred dollars a month to a few thousand dollars a month, so nail your budget down and stick to it from the start. If you have limited resources, make sure you’re utilizing the highest impact goals possible. 

The Next Step

Once you know what you want, it’s time to build out a foundation for your customers to uncover. SEO has to be a concern before you ever finish your site and that should rest on what you know to be true about your customers. 

Develop customer personas to truly understand your target audience. That will help you ensure that you’re creating engaging content for your users while still keeping an eye on your SEO practices. Often web design can be in conflict with the best SEO practices, so you’ll want to build your site from the ground up with SEO in mind. 

This may mean working with a professional designer, but it’s a strategy that will certainly pay off in the long run. That can mean integrating key aspects of technical SEO like reducing page speed load times, optimizing images, and more. 

Moving Off the Page

The best optimization practices, though, don’t just focus on what’s on the page. Instead, they also focus on what happens off the page, too. You want to position your startup as a thought leader in the industry, as someone consumers trust and can turn to so they can meet all of their needs. 

Most of that won’t happen on your pages. Instead, much of that work will take place when you take advantage of interview opportunities, guest blog options, and use your social media presence to interact with consumers. Applying a strategy that connects all of your efforts to create the authority needed for Google and other search engines to crawl and interpret you as a reputable organization. 

Maintenance is also a key here as the more content you create, update and optimize the more pages are indexed and crawlable, therefore putting you in a great position to attain your SEO Ranking goals. 

Outsourcing your SEO Work

Many startups wonder whether they should consider outsourcing their SEO work. It depends a bit on you, your time, and your knowledge of SEO as a whole. 

If you’re just getting started in the world of digital marketing, it might be worth it to work with a team of professionals who can help move your site further fairly quickly. 

Contact our SEO experts to help get you started on the right SEO strategy for you.