SEO for Startups: 6 Ways to Optimize Your Startup’s Blog Content for SEO

Is your startup’s blog SEO ready?

In the digital age, no startup can succeed unless they have a strong digital presence. SEO is vital for startups if you want to reach a critical mass and build a strong marketing channel that only compounds with time. But if you’re new to this, you might not know where to start.

We are here to help. Read on for 6 ways to optimize your startup’s blog content for SEO.

1. Get the Technical SEO Foundations Right

It might be tempting to build your website from scratch, but you will benefit far more from using a standard CMS. A CMS does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and is designed to make creating an optimized site quick and easy. There is a reason 45.8% of websites are powered by WordPress!

When building the site, keep user experience (UX) at the forefront of your mind. Not only does this improve the quality of your site, search engines track how your visitors behave and engage with your content to decide your ranking. This is going to be more important than ever before.

Search engines also rank based on-page speed. This is the time it takes for a page to load. Inefficient pages with lots of external content will negatively affect your ranking, so try to keep your blog as minimal as possible.

2. Do Keyword Research

A lot of startups make the mistake of writing content that their audience isn’t searching for. Use SEO tools to check for keywords your competition is using. Make sure to check the ‘difficulty’ scores. This will help you pick keywords that you have a good shot at ranking for. 

If you’re just starting to invest in content marketing, I would advise you to start with focusing on long tail keywords since those are easier to win compared to high volume keywords. 

Once you start winning the long tail keywords and start building topical authority, you can slowly start shifting your focus towards higher volume keywords. 

3. Choose Your Post Title Well

The title of your post is what appears on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s the first part that search engines use to determine if your content is relevant.

Before settling on a title for your content, check out what your competitors are doing. Just like your keyword research, this will tell you what appears to be working in your industry. Use this to inform your own titles. You want to stand out, but not scare your potential visitors away!

You want your target keywords in the first 60 characters of your title. Make sure they’re at the beginning, so they don’t get cut off.

4. Create Comprehensive Content

When it comes to SEO, content is still king.

When thinking about sub-topics you want to cover in your blog, make sure to check out your competition (the top ten search results are a good start). Scan through the articles and make a list of common subtopics your competition is talking. Once you finish the analysis, start to build your outline with most recurring subtopics. 

As you build your outline, your job is to provide answers to your audience. Use a tool like People Also Ask to find the hot questions your audience is asking. You can use this to help brainstorm content ideas, optimize your existing content and gain a competitive edge over your competitors.

When writing the copy, make sure you cover these questions and topics comprehensively. Comprehensive content tends to rank better since it not only answers all your audience’s questions but also keeps them engaged for longer. Eventually google starts to recognize that your users are enjoying the content and will start moving you up higher in search rankings! 

Thin content that provides no value to the audience will fail to rank, and can negatively impact your SEO.

Add images where required. Fill out the alternate text field with a description of the picture. The alt text describes what the image is all about. The alt text with the right keywords will help your images show up in image search. 

5. Write an Effective Meta Description

The meta description is the description that’s under your page title on the SERPs. They affect your click-through-rates. Having keywords inside this description isn’t as important as the title. But you want to keep it clear and match the reader intent to get them to click.

There isn’t such a thing as the perfect length. You need to convey your message without having to cut it off, but you want it to stay snappy. Try to keep it under 156 characters – if you have to go over that, your description needs to be more focused.

6. Internal Linking

Google and other search engines crawl websites following links to find and index content. When you are just starting out, you won’t have many external links pointing at your site, which means your internal links are more important.

Whenever you publish a new post, you should go through your previous posts and identify any organic placements for backlinks. Not only will this help your readers find useful content, it will also help your SEO. Search engines will see your popular pages and improve the ranking of the pages they link to, giving your new posts an immediate boost.

SEO for Startups Made Easy

So there you have it! If you follow these top tips for SEO for startups, you’ll be sure to succeed. Build a solid foundation then focus on producing helpful, useful, interesting content that helps you build a winning strategy on search. This will help attract backlinks and will reach the right people.

If you want to make your copy stand out, try our blog post optimizer for free today. We’ll find out what your post is missing and show you what you can do about it.

About Author:

Nikhil is the cofounder of Topic, a content research and optimization tool. At Topic, he likes to think about new ways to help writers spend less time doing rote work and more time exercising their creativity.