For both newly launched startups and established small businesses, search engine optimisation appears to be a powerful and cost-effective solution for becoming competitive in the tough market. By leveraging SEO and improving search engine rankings, you are creating:

• Brand awareness
• Online visibility
• Positive user experience
• Better conversions

In the long run, implementing SEO basics in your strategy can help you drive organic growth for your business–the higher you appear in search engine result pages (SERPs), the more people land on your website and the more trustworthy you appear. Respectively, SEO can help you not only survive the competition with bigger companies but actually outperform others and make your business thrive.

So, where do you start?

Equipping Your Success With SEO Tools

Before we move on to exploring the top SEO strategies for startups, we have to emphasise the importance of starting your journey in optimisation by finding the right tools. SEO tools for startups offer a wealth of benefits:

• First of all, they can help you make the process more guided by bringing accurate data and effective suggestions to the table.
• Also, using optimisation software can help your team save plenty of time on routine tasks and streamline your SEO efforts.
• Finally, there are many great, cost-effective SEO tools that are perfect for companies with restricted budgets. These tools help you save money while empowering your business with customisable and scalable SEO solutions to help you attain your goals and track your success with automated reporting. 

So, how do you equip yourself with affordable SEO tools? If you’re new to SEO, finding the best software options can be quite a challenge. There are plenty of different options out there, but it’s always hard to tell which one suits you. Luckily, there are third-party reviews and ratings such as a complete collection of White Label SEO Tools where you’ll find a list of the top solutions evaluated and hand-picked by experts. Using such lists to find white-label software options that match your company’s needs can help you get on the right track with SEO without large investments.

Implementing Baseline SEO Strategies For Startups

Once you have advanced tools that will simplify and streamline your efforts, there are three foundational tactics that your company needs to implement:

Research Relevant Keywords

When looking for information on the web, users leverage short-tail (1-2 words) and long-tail (3-5 words) queries related to what they are trying to find. By knowing what keywords your target audience uses and integrating them into your website, you can help search engines understand your site better and match it to relevant search requests. Hence, the first thing you need to do in your SEO approach is to find the keywords that will let you rank high.

There are several hacks to handle keyword research for small businesses:

• Brainstorm terms and phrases that describe your business, product, or service.
• Use Google’s search features, such as Autocomplete, People Also Ask, and People Also Search For, to find terms related to your primary keyword.
• Look up popular trends and trending seasonal topics with Google Trends.
• Use research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to detect dozens of related queries and assess them based on their competition and search volumes.

Pro tip: When trying to scale a small business, focus on targeting long-tail and local keywords. Both of these types of queries are more specific and, thus, less competitive, meaning that you can rank for them more easily. Besides, such specific keywords will help you attract niche audiences with a high potential to convert.

Implement On-Page Optimisation

After you handle keyword research, you can move on to on-page SEO. Here are the primary tips you should use:

• Optimise your website’s URLs. They have to be descriptive and memorable to improve navigation and user experience. You can leverage hyphens to separate words in URLs to make them more readable and easily understood. And where possible, you can insert your keywords into them.
• Enhance your meta tags and descriptions. Every page needs a unique title and description that aligns with its content and captures users’ attention. These elements will appear in SERPs and thus have to incite clicks. Put your primary keywords in tags and descriptions closer to the beginning, and keep them short–up to 50-60 characters for titles and up to 155-160 characters for descriptions—so they do not get truncated in the SERPs.
• Craft relevant and high-value content. Deliver content that answers your audience’s questions, engages them, and markets your products or services. Diversify your site with different content types to match various customer journey stages. And make your content SEO-friendly–naturally integrate keywords (avoiding stuffing), structure your content with headings and subheadings, use relevant and trusted external links for credibility, and add internal links to improve navigation and boost the time users spend on your site.
• Integrate images and other media to boost engagement. Optimise media file names and alt texts with your target keywords.

Handle Technical SEO

Finally, the last of the basic organic traffic growth strategies is technical optimisation. Unlike keyword integration and on-page optimisation, the results of your technical SEO efforts might be barely visible to the eye. Yet, this part of the process is pivotal because it not only helps improve your rankings but also helps ensure better user experiences, which usually leads to sales and loyalty and helps facilitate small business growth.

Here are some technical SEO basics to implement:

• Mobile-friendliness – Implement a responsive or fluid site layout to ensure your pages adjust to every user’s screen. Also, optimise your navigation, element placement, typography, and other site parts to make them friendly for mobile users.
• Site speed – Minimise the number of redirects and HTTP requests to decrease the load of your site. Also, implement caching, a content delivery network, and lazy loading to distribute the load and boost your site’s performance. Lastly, consider compressing your images and other media to ensure they don’t take too much time to load.
• Error-free navigation – Finally, enhance your technical SEO by improving site navigation. To get things right, create a clear page hierarchy, plan logical navigational paths, and implement convenient navigational features like menus, search bars, etc.

Improving Search Engine Rankings With Strategic Link-Building

While implementing SEO basics is important for getting your site out there and making it visible, relying solely on baseline tactics might be holding you back from real growth. So, if you want to build truly scalable SEO solutions for your startup or small business, you need to leverage some advanced tactics, too, one of which is off-page optimisation.

The core element of off-page optimisation is link-building. This is the process of earning backlinks that lead to your website from other trusted websites. Basically, such links serve as social proof that emphasises your authority and creates trust, thus helping your business grow.

Here are some simple tips for strategic link-building that can help you stimulate growth:

• Engage in guest blogging. Find reputable sites that align with your business and create high-quality content for them, featuring links to your own site.
• Craft unique content that contains insights or data that can’t be found anywhere else. Some types of content you can create are research findings, market analyses, infographics, case studies, expert guides, etc. So, website owners will be interested in adding such a link to their sites. 
• Partner with other companies, bloggers, and influencers. Creating content in partnerships can help you tap into new audiences and enhance your backlink profile.
• Create up-to-date business listings in popular directories to help you drive local audiences and grow awareness. Start by listing your company in general directories like Google Business, Yelp, Facebook, etc. Additionally, research location and niche-specific directories that can also help you improve your rankings.

Conclusion

Some of the biggest issues for startups and small businesses are tight competition, lack of brand awareness, and lack of audience trust. All these factors can hold your company back from growing. However, SEO for small businesses can help overcome them all.

By leveraging the core SEO strategies for startups we shared with you in this guide, you can make your brand discoverable, drive lots of organic traffic, and ensure conversions, thus stimulating growth. Although it’s an ongoing and high-effort process, engaging in optimisation is crucial for keeping your business competitive. Besides, by outsourcing SEO services to reliable tools, you can save time, money, and effort, achieving greater results. So start using the tips from this guide and help your company scale!