How to Grow Your Startup by Leveraging SEO

Steph is the founder of Formidable Forms, a drag & drop form builder for WordPress that empowers freelancers to create form-based solutions.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to grow your startup.

Higher search engine visibility makes it easier for you to connect with a relevant audience and generate quality leads for your business.

Almost all online experiences start with search engines. So, achieving higher rankings on the respective search queries helps you foster trust and generate traction for your brand organically.

Here's how you can successfully grow your startup by leveraging SEO:

1. Conduct Market Research

To make the most of your SEO efforts, it's essential to conduct extensive market research first. So, start things off by getting acquainted with your audience's preferences. The needs and interests of your target audience keep changing over time. So, knowing your target audience is an ongoing process.

The next thing you should do is conduct a competitor analysis. Exploring the search queries that your competitors target helps you identify the right keywords and optimize your content accordingly.

Plus, studying your competitors helps you understand what works and what doesn't. So, it paves the way for you to design an effective SEO strategy.

Next, analyze the current trends in your industry. Identifying topics that are the talk of the town and the pain points of your audience helps you stay relevant by facilitating access to the required information.

2. Identify a Content Gap

The content gap encompasses low-hanging traction opportunities that you either missed or have not cashed in yet.

To grow your business, you need to find search queries that are relevant, but somehow you are not targeting them.

Identifying the content gap may come in handy here, as it helps you find keywords that your core competitors target but not you.

Finding search queries with high volume, low ranking difficulty, and an intent that aligns with your goals may help you grow your business by getting better search engine visibility.

3. Optimize Your Website

Search engine giants like Google favor websites that are able to offer a seamless experience to their visitors. So, another effective way to leverage your startup by leveraging SEO is to optimize your website as per the search engine guidelines.

You can start things off by optimizing on-page elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and the content of the page as per the focus keywords. This will increase your relevance and make it easier for search engine crawlers to explore the information published on your site.

Next, consider improving the speed of your website. If your pages take ages to load, it's likely that your visitors will leave and go elsewhere to access the required information. Improving your website speed helps you offer a seamless user experience, which complements your SEO and helps you attract more visitors.

To take the user experience up a notch, you need to consider making your website mobile-responsive. Ensuring your website performs well across all device types helps you cast a wider net by catering to the preferences of your target audience.

Last but not least, you need to come up with a strong internal linking strategy. Internal links not only facilitate your visitors' access to relevant information but also help distribute the authority of your top-performing pages across your site.

Making the aforesaid optimization changes facilitates user engagement and sends positive signals to search engines, which in turn amplifies the traction you generate.

4. Create a Strong Backlink Profile

Having quality backlinks from relevant and high-authority platforms complements your website's authority and helps you score higher search engine rankings.

One of the most effective ways to create a strong backlink profile is by creating fresh and relevant content, as it helps you score quality backlinks on autopilot.

Another viable strategy is guest posting, where you leverage third-party platforms and publish your content there to get more backlinks the right way.

Remember, just increasing the number of quality backlinks won't be enough. You have to ensure that you don't accumulate negative or poor-quality backlinks over time.

For this, you have to refrain from spamming, buying backlinks, encouraging exchange links, getting backlinks through PBNs, building backlinks through directory submissions, and scoring backlinks from irrelevant websites.

To deal with poor-quality backlinks accumulated over time, identify the sources, send them a request for link removal, and submit a disavow file to let search engines know that they should ignore links to your website from the specified domains.

5. Improve Local SEO

Startup owners often neglect the importance of local SEO when it comes to scaling their businesses.

There's a number of people who prefer supporting businesses in their vicinity. Improving your local SEO helps you capitalize on that and enables you to generate traction from a specific geographic area.

Leveraging Google My Business Listing may come in handy here, as it helps you increase your startup's visibility on Google Maps and improve your rankings with respect to search queries with a local intent.

You should also ensure that the NAP (name, address, and phone number) for your business is accurate and consistent across all online platforms, including social media and business directories.

Creating localized content and promoting it through local events or communities may also help and make it easier for you to engage the intended audience.

Plus, you should consider leveraging and encouraging your customers to share their positive experiences in the form of reviews or testimonials, as they boost your startup's reputation locally and fuel your SEO.

Final Words

There you have it: the five ways to grow your startup by leveraging SEO. If you've been striving to generate more traction organically and increase the visibility of your business online, the recommendations in this article may come in handy.