It’s exciting to be an early-stage startup. There are adventures on your entrepreneurial journey, tight budgets, and challenges to competing against brands for top keyword terms. How we see it: one side of the coin may be challenging; the other is empowerment. With the power of SEO, you can be found in competitive SERPs.
Here’s the thing—SEO can be a slow burner, especially when you are an early-stage startup and the cash flows are tight. However, if you invest in your SEO early, it can help you immensely.
How? First, it can help develop an acquisition funnel. Plus, it will create brand visibility, which can help with customer retention. Now, that’s great. Keep reading, as we demystify how proven SEO strategies can support early-stage startups to grow their business.
Top SEO Strategies to Unleash the True Potential
Determine Pain Points and Optimize Content.
Imagine you are developing or selling a next-generation product. It could be emerging or still not adopted at a massive scale. In such a scenario, it is logical that keyword search volumes may not be your strength.
Let’s break a myth! If you think that pain points can be seen through the lens as solutions or product features, you are wrong. So, let’s get this straight. A list of features and sales messaging doesn’t always directly address the user’s pain points.
So, what many verticals do is take a high search volume term (aka head term) and then work on it—backward. However, think about it. What if you find that there are no head terms? Furthermore, what would you do if ranking for a keyword looked challenging in the short term due to competition?
Here’s what you can do—brainstorm, research, and reflect on “why” the product may be needed. The insights can help you identify new messages and content that may even be ideas your competitors haven’t thought of. You may choose to answer a lot of these questions. Plus, some questions may have short answers. Next, you can link them to blog articles, resources, or even commercial pages and offer further information. What you can also choose to do is to have a live support section.
Avoid Neglecting Support Content & Invest in the Support Center
Many verticals try to break keywords and pages on a site into facets such as commercial and non-commercial, or top and bottom of the funnel. What happens with this method? It may be great to match content to user intent. However, the support content gets neglected.
Here’s the thing—when it comes to SEO, while personas can be great assets for your marketing teams, remember to not use them as strict guidelines from which you curate all your marketing channels.
So, what can you do? Invest in your support sections. It is wise to take feedback from customer service and sales teams and work on building the standard FAQ-style support articles.
Plus, if users are looking for content that’s close (or relevant) to your brand/product, remember that it will make sense to be a part of that idea-sharing or conversation. How to get on such platforms? You may choose to look at:
- Conversations on your site’s live chat
- Threads in developer forums
- Conversations between prospects and the sales team, and more
Blend and Balance Gated and Ungated Content
Let’s start with understanding gated content. It is content that is designed to generate leads.
For example, resources such as ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars fall here. As an early-stage startup, it may be difficult to know when to gate content and when not to.
So, the gated content fits in a wider ecosystem. And you can work on-page optimization for one or two high search volume queries that have little user value proposition.
Here is a startling fact for you: It is unlikely that this type of content will rank well or even drive the lead. Why? Well, your competitors probably have ungated content answering the same questions. So, the key takeaway is that when you are trying to create content that offers the same value as gated content, you will face conflicts from other stakeholders.
What can you do? Try ungating this content. You can now look forward to attracting more relevant traffic to your site, and working on assets that build trust.
The Final Word
In today’s new era, formulating an SEO strategy for your early-stage startup needs agility and novelty. However, you can achieve game-changing results with the right SEO strategies and mindset. If you find it overwhelming to set foot among your competitors, partner with a proficient website developer, such as Cosmic Technologies. We have helped many early-stage startups with incredible growth on their digital journeys. Let’s talk.