Setting Business Goals with SEO

Let’s start with goals, as they are the cornerstone from which you’ll derive your direction. The overarching SEO goal for any project is to enhance rankings in search engines, drive as much traffic as possible to your site, and convert cold leads into customers. SEO efforts yield a lasting effect, unlike targeted or contextual advertising, which works only as long as you pay for it.

However, your project may have additional business goals:

• Improve brand awareness;
• Increase revenue;
• Expand into new markets, including international ones;
• Foster customer loyalty;
• Establish the project as a socially responsible business, and more.

Decide on these aspects early on, as they will influence keyword research, tools for website optimization, and the overall implementation of your SEO strategy.

Keyword Research and Application

Before researching keywords for optimizing website pages and creating content, understand your target audience and who your product should appeal to. Conduct preliminary research to comprehend your audience’s needs, pains, and experiences, along with demographic indicators such as age, gender, location, and other data that will help you choose the most suitable keywords.

You don’t have to search for keywords manually; there are specialized tools for this purpose:

• Dominator helps select primary keywords, synonyms, and phrases to build engaging content suitable for your target audience.
• Ubersuggest not only searches for keywords and allows you to cluster them but also helps analyze competitors’ keywords.
• SEMrush allows for analysis of competitor keywords while helping to evaluate the difficulty of key phrases, finding the right balance between competitiveness and relevance.

Utilizing synonyms, long-tail keywords, and various variations of primary keywords will help you reach a broader audience. Keep in mind that consumer behavior, expectations, and needs may change over time. Thus, in compiling your keyword list, be as adaptive and flexible as possible to respond promptly to any changes and stay on trend.

Content Strategy and Optimization

SEO promotion for a startup is nearly impossible without creating high-quality content. You need an effective content strategy that includes developing guides, creating podcasts and infographics, eBooks, and research. Address issues that will genuinely interest and resonate with your target audience, providing answers to their search requests. This forms the foundation for building trust between you and your potential clients.

In addition to being valuable and useful, content should be enriched with relevant keywords to ensure easy discoverability in search engines. The higher the quality of your content, the more likely it is to be shared and go viral, positively impacting the recognition of your project and earning backlinks to your resource. Focus on quality, from creating optimized headlines to selecting intriguing and resonant topics to implementing your ideas.

Technical SEO Considerations

Initiate technical SEO optimization as early as possible to minimize potential issues that could affect your site’s indexing and ranking. Address common problems like duplicate content, incorrect URL structures, and missing sitemaps. Regularly maintaining technical SEO is beneficial in the long run.

Optimal initiation of technical SEO optimization should occur as soon as the site is created. This minimizes work, sets the right course for further development, and ensures all pages of your platform are correctly indexed and well-ranked by search engines from the start.

What does technical SEO for your site entail?

The initial stage involves analyzing and diagnosing problems and creating a comprehensive list of improvements, enhancements, or modifications needed to meet all technical requirements.

• Remove duplicate content to avoid confusing search engines. Duplicate content should be deleted or consolidated to provide a cohesive picture.
• Fix unreadable and relevant URLs.
• Add a sitemap to improve navigation for search engine bots, enabling efficient and accurate indexing of existing content and future publications.
• Eliminate or correct non-functional pages that fail to load. Some may require reworking and fixing, while others may need redirects.
• Address existing errors.

Regular technical SEO, including secure connection protocols, data encryption, page load speed optimization, and proper mobile platform display, is crucial. Regular checks and corrections allow you to maintain site functionality, identify issues before they become critical, and continually improve the site for every user ready to become your client.

Creating an SEO-Friendly Infrastructure

As crucial as ensuring fast loading and mobile optimization is, creating user-friendly navigation is equally important. Solutions that are convenient and easy for users are also SEO-friendly, eliminating the need for a scattered approach. Consider your website from a first-time user’s perspective: can they quickly find everything they need, view necessary information, and locate products or services of interest?

It’s advisable to collaborate with UI/UX design specialists when crafting the site’s architecture. They can help make the site user-friendly and ergonomic based on consumer scenarios and behavior patterns. Additionally, it’s recommended to work separately on the desktop and mobile versions since the logic for mobile users differs due to the convenience of on-the-go functionalities.

Building Links and Influencer Outreach

Once all technical tasks are completed, including optimized headlines and meta-tags, and quality content is created, it’s time to move forward and build a quality link profile. Start with internal linking on the site and then explore all possible ways to obtain high-quality backlinks:

• Collaborate with influencers;
• Participate in digital PR activities;
• Publish guest posts;
• Present your project as an expert in a specific industry;
• Create exclusive research, eBooks, podcasts, and other valuable tools and assets worth sharing.

The key to success is straightforward: the more high-quality, expert, and useful content you offer, the more organic backlinks you receive. These backlinks increase user trust in your resource, boost traffic, and elevate conversion rates. Improved rankings in search results are just a positive side effect, as a well-structured link-building strategy guides your company toward increased popularity and profitability.

Regular Monitoring and Adjustments

It’s unrealistic to expect that implementing certain SEO measures once will be enough for your project to continue scaling and gaining popularity. Be prepared for some tools to work better for your case, while others may not deliver the desired results. Therefore, another crucial step in site optimization is measuring results, analyzing and assessing them, and making subsequent adjustments. This allows you to maintain a flexible approach and focus on actions that yield the best results. Simultaneously, you can discard actions that consume time and resources but are less essential.

Regular monitoring is your ally, preventing you from expending your efforts in vain. It’s essential to analyze all aspects:

• Effectiveness of keywords;
• Traffic to pages;
• Quality and functionality of backlinks;
• Site functionality and loading speed.

By tracking these elements and adjusting your SEO strategy promptly, you can stay competitive in the online market and identify new prospects for development and enhancement.

Leveraging SEO Tools and Resources

You already know what you can do to improve your site’s visibility in search engines. Now, let’s explore some convenient and useful tools that will help you achieve this more quickly and effectively. This list comprises must-have tools for every webmaster, so let’s get acquainted with them.

Ahrefs

Even those who have never engaged in SEO are familiar with what Ahrefs is. Ahrefs allows you to search for keywords, explore content topics, analyze competitors, track your site’s performance, work with backlinks, and obtain detailed and comprehensive statistics.

Ubersuggest

If you want to expand the basic list of keywords with additional queries that your audience might be searching for, you need a tool like Ubersuggest. Similar to Ahrefs, this service analyzes your competitors’ content and provides insights on optimizing your content to make it more valuable, high-quality, and overall better than what already exists on the Internet.

Google: Analytics and Search Console

No matter how many additional SEO tools you search for, Analytics and Search Console are the foundation for anyone working with SEO. Most information you need can be found right here. Additionally, you’ll need to master these services to get accurate analytics, add a sitemap, and receive notifications about any issues with the functioning of your website.

Conclusion

Remember that SEO is closely intertwined with your overall development and scaling strategy and marketing plan. Therefore, all SEO efforts should align with your overarching strategy. Ensure that all your actions and measures are coordinated and all tools complement and enhance each other’s effectiveness. With such an approach, you will move in the digital world much faster than your competitors, and soon, your startup will become a well-known, serious, and successful business.