[Guide] Create an SEO Strategy to Maximize Startup Website Traffic

Another critical piece of inbound marketing is creating an SEO strategy to maximize traffic, your startup website traffic. You won’t get very far if your website can’t be found by anybody on Google or any of the search engines. By optimizing your website for search, you have a much better chance of being found when a potential customer searches for what your company does. Search engine optimization is getting traffic from the natural listings, so the different things that pop up naturally in the search results.

And so that’s what you’re trying to optimize for. So one thing to keep in mind here, and this is a very easy pitfall that a lot of people happen to fall in to when they’re thinking about search engine optimization, is keyword stuffing. So keyword stuffing is basically the practice of having too many keywords on the page. So what a lot of companies will think is by stuffing their website with different keywords in keyword phrases that Google will actually determine that your website is very much related to the keywords and then rank that higher than other sites.

However, this is a huge no-no that results in unnatural content, which Google can now detect.Google has gotten very good at detecting natural, authentic content and detecting things that are trying to game the system. So what should you avoid? So avoid too many on-page keywords, so make sure that you’re not stuffing your website with too many keywords. Make sure that too many keywords are not stuffed in to the meta tags, so as you’re creating each of the pages in your CMS, like WordPress, make sure that you’re not kind of stuffing too many keywords into the meta tags that you can input on those systems, and if you do do these things, your website might be banned or penalized by Google, which you really do not want.

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So it’s super critical to pay attention to these things and to make your website natural with SEO optimization in mind. Take an example of keyword stuffing. So you can see how many times any website and this particular article mentions a particular keyword in all different types of ways, but if you actually read it, it may sound very unnatural. It’s very obvious to the reader that it’s being keyword stuffed and it will also be obvious to Google as well, so avoid anything that looks like this.

How to Maximize Startup Website Traffic

So you need to optimize in the right way. So the first step here is to choose three to five keywords that are priority that you want to optimize for. Optimizing for too many keywords gets a little bit confusing. Think about what are the top three to five things that my company does and optimize for those. You can optimize by adding high quality link backs from other reputable websites. So this is really a great way to drive traffic to your site as well and this is why blogging and content and social media is important because other websites might repost some of your content or link back to your content and this is what you want because Google will see other reputable websites linking back to your site and since these other websites are reputable, Google will see you as a reputable site as well.

Always offer educational and authentic content. Because Google’s natural language processing has gotten so sophisticated, they are able to determine what’s educational and authentic versus what’s keyword stuffed. So your best bet here is to just make authentic content and do it naturally and Google will start picking your website up. And engagement on social channels also plays in to this as well. Google does look for social media signals, so who’s sharing content from your website, who’s actually sharing content directly from your site, who’s linking back.

So engagement on the key social channels will help you as you move up in the page rankings. How do you choose the keywords that you want to optimize for? So I definitely suggest sitting down and having a workshop with the marketing organization as well as some key executives and answering some of the following questions. What does my company do? What are the key search terms people use when they want to learn more about my business? What are my different products or services? What needs do my products and services fill? And then, what keywords do my competitors rank for? And then, what is the traffic opportunity for each keyword? So by using Google AdWords, you can generally be able to find out what the traffic opportunity is for each keyword.

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So is it high traffic, is it low traffic, are you using very, very niche keywords or are you using a keyword that might have a lot more people searching for it? And that will very much depend on your company and what your company does. So here’s an SEO tip, and this is something that I absolutely have done in very many past roles, is selecting the three to five top keywords that you want to rank for. This helps you focus and it clarifies your efforts in your overall objectives.

How to Increase Startup Website Traffic?

I’ve definitely seen many companies that have tried to rank from SEO perspective for a lot of different keywords. Your best bet is to start with a select few and to really focus your time on optimizing for those. So in order to perfect on-page SEO, you should make sure that each page is only assigned one keyword. So that’s the best way to make sure that Google really has a solid understanding of what your website does and that where they should link for each particular page. And so as you go through your website, you want to assign one keyword grouping to each specific page.

Your pages must also fill a need and answer a question. So if you’re thinking back on what people are searching for on Google, you know, you want to make sure that that page that’s assigned to that keyword fills that need and answers a question. You don’t want that content just kind of sitting out there with no purpose. And then your pages must be linkable. So you do want people to link back to these pages. You want people to link back to them if they’re thinking and writing about your company on their website and then you also want to make sure that you’re linking different pages within your own website.

So the whole purpose of on-page SEO is to make a certain page rank for a certain keyword. So in addition to on-page SEO and thinking through your content and design, you also need to think through technical SEO. You want to make sure you’re assigning title tags. So use keywords in the title that appear in your browser tab or in a search engine results page. So there’s particular keywords that you can actually assign to each of these titles so that when it appears in the browser tab, these are very much related to what your business does.

How to Increase Traffic to your Startup Website

Make sure you’re structuring your URLs appropriately. Your URL should always be concise and also include keywords and remember, these keywords, no matter if it’s title tags or URLs, should map back to what that particular page’s keyword is. Always fill out the meta descriptions. So the meta descriptions, you can fill that out in your CMS, and so this is what the search engine actually pulls as the description for your page. So think about as your going through Google, generally you’ll see the title and then you’ll see the website of that company is,and then you’ll always see a description as you’re looking at the search results.

That description is the meta description. So you want to make sure that description is really tight. Utilize links naturally. So you want to build links throughout your website that point to the proper keywords and pages, but these links should be built very naturally. Don’t have a ton of different links on each page. Make sure that the profile that you’re building for your links appears naturally and does point to the right pages and the right keywords. So you also want to remember to constantly measure your search engine optimization efforts.

So this is something that’s not going to be a completely easy fix, especially if you’re just starting out it will take some time for your website to be properly optimized, and you need Google to keep kind of re-crawling it. This is something that’s more of a long play that’ll happen over the course of time. However, coming up in the search engine results from an inbound marketing and lead on perspective is critically important. So to measure your SEO efforts you want to make sure that you’re measuring search engine ranking for key terms.

 

How to Check Startup Website Traffic?

So for the priority key terms you have, make sure that you are constantly keeping track of what that ranking is. Is it going down? Is it going up? Are you on page one, which is where you want to be? Referring visits. So where are the visits on your website coming from? Are they coming from social media? Are they coming from some of the ads that you’ve done? Are they coming from other pages that are referring traffic to your website? This also helps your SEO efforts. Conversion rates to the top CTAs. So are you starting to increase your conversion rates to some of those top calls to action? As you see your search engine rankings go up, your conversion rates should also go up.

And then look at specific page traffic for optimized pages. Particularly if you’re doing a power page content, you want to make sure you’re constantly tracking what the traffic is for these pages and if it’s going up because ultimately, those are most likely the pages that you are going to want to rank for your particular key terms. When it comes to inbound marketing, search engine optimization is one of the number one things that you can do to really increase your website traffic and those leads generated.

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If you can’t be found, then nobody knows who your company is and you won’t be able to generate those high quality leads. By making sure that your startup website is properly optimized, you will start generating more and more leads over time directly through your website.