{"id":13315,"date":"2016-07-13T20:11:15","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T09:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creately.com\/blog\/?p=13315"},"modified":"2023-06-12T16:24:25","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T05:24:25","slug":"guide-to-start-up-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creately.com\/blog\/marketing-sales\/guide-to-start-up-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"A Helpful Guide to Start-up SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

\"A<\/p>\n

Whenever I attend start-up conferences, I get to meet many founders of early stage-startups. While almost all of them are focused heavily on their product, marketing it is almost an afterthought. This is understandable for few reasons.<\/p>\n

First of all, most early stage start-ups are headed by software engineers or someone with a tech background. It\u2019s hard to find a team that has someone from marketing in a leadership role. Another reason is that you need a robust and working product to secure investments. So naturally the emphasis is on the product and not on marketing.<\/p>\n

But things like social media marketing and search engine marketing has made it extremely easy for start-ups to reach potential clients quickly and affordably. Take Creately for example, we rely heavily on traffic coming from search engines. This has enabled us to attract customers like NASA, Amazon, NatGeo and PayPal without having to succumb to sales pitches and calls.<\/p>\n

Search engine optimization is a complex area with algorithms and strategies that change frequently. But the basics of SEO haven\u2019t changed much since its beginning. Below are the first few steps to search engine domination. I\u2019m just going over the main points briefly; make sure to check out linked tools and articles to get a thorough understanding of each topic.<\/p>\n

Keyword Research<\/h3>\n

This is one of the most important steps in any SEO campaign and should be your first step in the journey to search engine domination.<\/p>\n

The goal of SEO is not to get a lot of traffic, but to get the right kind of traffic. This means potential visitors who will convert into leads and traffic. And you need to find out which keywords bring in the right kinds of users. And keyword research helps you do just that.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s very own keyword planner tool, which comes with Adwords, is a good free option. There are also commercially available tools that can be used to get further insight on keywords.<\/p>\n

Check out the Moz\u2019s section about keyword research and why it\u2019s important<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You can make use of this research to improve your search engine rankings for the right keywords and get the right kind of customers.<\/p>\n

You can add those keywords strategically for on-site optimization of important pages. You can also create blog posts and other articles targeting those keywords. You can even make use of them for Adwords bidding if you\u2019re taking that approach.<\/p>\n

SEO Audit<\/h3>\n

This is another important step for any website that\u2019s starting out a SEO campaign. This enables you to find out if your site is inadvertently sending the wrong signal to search engine spiders. Your site might have duplicate content, lots of broken links, multiple pages with the same title and many other common mistakes which will lead to search engines penalizing your site.<\/p>\n

Screaming Frog\u2019s SEO spider<\/a> is an excellent tool which you can use for this purpose. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 pages with some limitation. But that should be more than enough for a start-up that doesn\u2019t have many pages.<\/p>\n

An SEO audit can cover a large area and we have touched upon it briefly in this blog post about doing an SEO audit. There are plenty of articles that go in depth into this, so make sure to do some further reading to get the maximum results.<\/p>\n

On-site Optimization<\/h3>\n

If SEO is a house, then on-site optimization is its foundation. And we all know what happens to a house with a poor foundation.<\/p>\n

As the name implies, this step is all about optimizing your content and site structure for search engines and users. Some of the things done in this step are<\/p>\n