A new business is always the culmination of a long-held dream, preparations, and a lot of work. There’s a lot of enthusiasm injected into the new venture and investors don’t even contemplate failure. But unfortunately, many startups fail and as an investor, there are crucial lessons to learn from these failures. At the heart of the contemporary business, marketing is search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s important to not make any seo mistakes.
A powerful SEO strategy helps ground your business firmly in your niche. SEO increases your brand’s visibility, helps brand awareness, brand authority and boosts ranking on search engines for target keywords. Poorly designed and implemented SEO is the Achilles heel of many new businesses.
Read on to find out the common SEO mistakes, startups mistakes and how to avoid them.
Avoid These 5 Common SEO Mistakes by Startups
No/poor Keyword Research
What do you think your target customer will search for online? This is one of the first questions you have to ask when creating your content. Most startup owners are in a rush to create and publish content for visibility. While content is king, this maxim only works when you convert. Keyword research should guide your content strategy.
With the right keyword strategy, you can earn an engaged audience, increased conversion, gain marketing trend insight, maximize your time and resources, and you can leverage the latest keyword trends. Other benefits include help to place keywords in the right spot. You have multiple keyword research tools to give you the most powerful keywords.
Keyword research gives your content strategy direction, identifies new topics, best listings on Google, and you target the right audience. Failure to invest in keyword research means you waste a lot of time and effort creating ineffective content. You’ll suffer poor engagement, low conversion, and ultimately, poor ranking.
Failure to Build Links
Linking is an important aspect of search engine optimization. However, this is an often overlooked strategy by many startups. Google is averse to black hat linking tactics, but with the right strategy and tools, you can leverage this powerful SEO technique. Link building can help search engines find your new web pages faster. This also determines how well a page rank in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Link building helps with referral traffic, brand building, relations building, and boosts sales opportunities. Links give your brand credibility, help with ranking, improve site metrics and SEO scores, increase your authority, and lower bounce rates.
Many startups miss out on the advantage of links because they don’t have the right skills in their team. Partnering with an SEO Agency unlocks your potential and helps you leverage this powerful SEO tool.
Some powerful link building ideas for a startup include guest posting, promoting your content, creating infographics, building online relationships, commenting on authority blogs, using website directories and business listings.
Failure to Work with an SEO Consultant
With so much information on SEO available online, it’s easy to overlook the need for an SEO professional or digital marketing company such as iTonic for your campaigns. This is the biggest mistake startups make and they pay for it dearly. An SEO expert brings some objectivity into your campaign and specialized skills.
These professionals understand the latest Webmaster Guidelines and ensure your SEO campaign conforms to the stringent requirements. When working with an SEO company, you unlock your brand’s marketing potential. The experts assess your brand’s vision and objectives and build a campaign tailored to suit these needs.
Many startups suffer heavy penalties from search engines because of black hat SEO tactics. Your SEO professional can protect you from this and save you money and time. The specialist works with you to identify the right tactics to suit your campaign. You get real-time reports on the project and you can tweak strategies along the way. Your SEO consultant campaign builds a campaign founded on key metrics.
Forgetting Analytics
If you want to build an SEO campaign for your new business, integrate analytics into everything you do. Many business owners have an idea about SEO, but they implement multiple techniques without a system of tracking in place.
Analytics helps you gauge your website’s performance optimally in search. With an analytics system in place, you can tell which tactics are generating traffic, and track every aspect of your campaigns. With different analytics tools, you can track the ROI of your campaigns, identify the different sources of traffic, help with keyword research, generate insight to help optimize your campaign and help with competitor analysis.
Some important SEO metrics include organic traffic, bounce rate, returning visitors vs new visitors, landing page and click-through rate (CTR), keyword ranking, page load speed and conversion rate, domain authority, new backlinks and referring domains, and page speed.
Poor/No Content Strategy
A content strategy involves transforming your business objectives and goals and integrating these into your content. Your content strategy starts with creation, planning, development, and management of content to meet your business goals and objectives.
It’s a critical process in SEO campaigns, but many startups overlook this step and rush to create content. A content strategy ensures you don’t create content for the sake of it. You have goals and objectives to achieve and your content should help you meet these goals.
To create your content strategy, you identify your target audience, define your topic area, find keywords, optimize for search, refresh content, and track content performance. With a solid content strategy, you’ll enjoy better ranking pages, more relevant site traffic, building an authority voice, building customer loyalty, and you can leverage multiple types of content.
It might be cliché, but content is king in SEO and you can boost conversion, build brand visibility and awareness and much more. If you don’t have an SEO strategy in place, you’ll waste resources creating and distributing content that won’t convert. This is one of the most common mistakes new businesses make.
If you’re setting up an online business or yours is already up and running, start building an SEO strategy now. A strong SEO strategy can make all the difference in the highly competitive business landscape. With the right strategy, you identify the best techniques, leverage data from analytics tools, help with lead generation, create content for the right audience, choose the right keywords and all these help build visibility of your brand. With this insight, you now know the SEO mistakes to avoid.
