You’ve built your website.
You think the website works well for your business but you’re not sure.
People have been finding you online, but you’re don’t have metrics or figures on how many people have visited your website, or even what avenues, like search keywords, etc., they took to find you.
You just can’t afford to pay for advertising yet, so you’re really depending on organic search to bring customers to you.
When it comes to SEO, it’s never too early to start. Here are a few ways to ease into SEO for your startup website.
Have an SEO plan and stick to it
The first step, even before you build your site, is having an SEO plan or strategy.
If you want a blog, ramble away. But if you want a website to achieve a specific, measurable goal then you need a plan.
A good SEO plan will include the following:
- Good website structure. Websites that don’t meet customer expectations have high bounce rates. (Bounce is the measurement of customers who leave webpages after a few seconds.)
- Know what you want your website to achieve, what success looks like: more website visits, email signups, customers calls, or visits to your location or storefront.
- Analyze your website performance metrics, so you can see if your plan is working, make small tweaks as necessary
- Make sure your website has clear CTAs (call to actions)
- Research similar websites to see what they did, and if you can use or improve on their example
- Do keyword planning—what keywords are competitors using? Are there other keywords you can focus on to get better results (barbeque vs. bbq)
Analyzing your metrics
The only way you can know if your website is working is by tracking your results.
Try tracking views, organic search, and other metrics from the very beginning so you can see your weekly progress.
Use metatags and other metadata early and often
Metadata is information in your website’s code that tells browsers or search engines what information to use to describe your website to users. It also affects your search rank.
A meta tag is your website description, embedded into code, which tells search engine results pages what your page is about. It’s not displayed on the website anywhere, only found in the code.
It can be changed later, but the sooner you put the correct meta info in, the more likely your page is to move up in rankings.
Don’t forget Google My Business – it’s free and helps your SEO
Google My Business can help you with local marketing.
Though it has paid options, you can create a free business profile. Once your business is “verified” it’ll show up on Google Maps.
You may also get better position in organic results because some users may see your Business Profile “box.” It’s a display similar to the highlighted local results you see when you look up local establishments like area restaurants.
Good SEO may not be easy, but it doesn’t have to be hard either
Those are just a few tips to help you get started with your SEO early on. The main thing to remember is that there’s a learning curve for everyone when they start their SEO for the first time.
So just start somewhere.
