Every startup needs to build its brand name online without which people will hardly acknowledge its existence on the web. SEO or Seach Engine Optimization plays a crucial role in establishing your online presence at a minimal cost. This works in favor of most startups as they lack funding.
While most people would recommend startups to follow the footsteps of successful businesses when it comes to establishing their brand name, it is nothing for than a myth. To improve organic traffic for a startup, it is essential to implement strategies that aren’t expensive and takes lesser time to show results. Here are some SEO hacks for startups that are worth noting.
Cornerstone Content is the Key
Cornerstone content is evergreen, keyword-rich, detailed and up-to-date. It is a content that is based on a topic with high search volume and is optimized with keywords that people are searching for. It takes a website to write a minimum of three topics of more than 1000 words to qualify as cornerstone content.
Utilize Free SEO Tools
You don’t need to invest in premium SEO tools to improve your online visibility. There are plenty of SEO tools available online for which you don’t need to invest a penny. Tools like Google Analytics report can help you check your website performance and compare it with the competitors. Other free SEO tools that can come handy are SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner and Page Speed Insights.
Use Long-tail Keywords
Google keyword planner is a free tool that helps you find keywords that can improve your online visibility. This tool brings organic traffic to your website provided that you place the keywords naturally within your content.
Write Long-Form Content
Another SEO hack is to focus on building long-form content. Generally, any content that is of 2000 words and above are considered long-form. Long-form content can cover every minute detail related to a topic, which makes it even more valuable than hundreds of short articles related to the same topic.
With a long-form content in place, there’s less possibility of people leaving your website to learn more about the topic. However, it must be kept in mind that the long-form content should be engaging and written using bullet points and sub-headlines to make it easier for the readers to understand.
Respond to Blog Comments
Allowing comments on blogs can boost online visibility. As a startup, you should always encourage people to comment and share your blog posts. Regardless of how old your post is, you should always reply to new comments because it gives your free backlink opportunities. Alternatively, you could also use this technique on other blogs and forums to leave valuable comments along with your blog links.
Submit Site to StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a useful platform to get your website discovered. It contains a community-submitted group of websites that are displayed to users who might want to stumble on them. It is a great opportunity for startups with brand new sites to gain some followers from StumbleUpon’s community.
To do this, you need to install the StumbleUpon plugin, where you will get a toolbar for your browser. Just click the thumbs-up icon there and get your site discovered.
Create Infographics
Infographics are helpful to help a site rank because visual data works much effectively than text. Infographics use rich images and minimum text to explain a subject with much simplicity. Also, it takes very less time to check an infographic compared to the time required to read a blog post on the same topic. Infographics also have more possibility of being shared socially, thus increasing the opportunity to be more visible online.
Track Trending Topics
Running out of topics to write for your blog? Keep track of the trending news topics on Google and start writing articles on the same. Nothing can get your content more attention than writing something on a trending topic. You can use tools like Google trends to understand which topics have been searched frequently on the web.
Conduct Regular Site Audit
A regular site audit can help you understand the issues that might hold back your website to rank well in the search results. Getting a professional SEO analyst to check your site for its speed, structure and other essential elements that directly affect the user experience on your website can help you to fix them before its too late.
Retain Visitors on Your Site With Amazon Polly
Amazon Polly is a speech recognition tool that can help visitors on your site to read out an article from your blog. With the help of this tool, you can retain your online visitors for a longer time so that people can utilize the reading time to check out other elements of your website.
Make your Website Mobile-Friendly
With Google Incorporating mobile-first index everywhere, it is essential for websites, especially new ones, to have a mobile-friendly version of the site for people to discover and explore. Without a mobile-friendly website, you will miss out on the massive chunk of mobile traffic that is dominant on the web and fail to rank above your competitors.
Track Your Competitors
While copying your competitors might not be the best idea to earn success, you can always track your competitors to understand what strategies they are trying to implement on their site. This will give you an idea about how to plan a new website strategy and improvise on the existing one. Sometimes, competitor blogs can give you fresh content ideas or help discover keywords that you can use to cash-in more visitors to your site.
Conclusion
SEO is a handy tool for businesses of any size to improve their online presence. When SEO is appropriately implemented, it can help small businesses and startups to overcome the popularity of well-established brands. So, try these 12 SEO hacks and see your startup thrive in the growing online community.
Author Bio:
Shreoshe has been writing professionally for more than three years. She has experience in guest posting service and enjoys learning new technologies. She's also a movie buff and an amazing cook. She plans to start an animal shelter someday to work for the welfare of street animals.