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10 SEO Tips For Marketing Your Startup in 2015

This article is more than 8 years old.

Marketing a startup in today's Internet is a whole different ball game from ten years ago. Even as recently as two years ago, SEO was a horse of a different color, one that made it easy to slip past the search engine censors and be a success without truly considering the intricate details of SEO in reference to your website. The new face of the Internet requires a fresh strategy when it comes to developing SEO that works to keep your business relevant in search engine results. Among the things you can try are:

1. Figure Out Your Target Keywords: All proper SEO research starts with target keywords. Based on your demographic and an in-depth analysis of current and recent search trends you can easily determine the keywords that have the most return with the least competition. What you're going for here is trying to get your readers interested in your content, and as any content marketer will tell you, it's the first step towards building a rapport with your audience.

2. Mobile Friendly is a Necessity: Creative Director for Avila Web Firm, Dan Steiner is noted as saying, "Mobile friendly is becoming the new standard, as was made apparent by Google's latest update. Most folks think that they need to completely re-do their websites, which is just simply not the case. There are plenty of resources online that can convert websites to mobile-friendly standards, without breaking the bank." Even if budget is your concern, you have far more to lose from a site that isn't mobile compatible than you save from not making it mobile compatible.

3. Simple is Usually Better: Creating content to market a startup means making a connection with your target audience. Keeping it simple is the best way to get information across to someone who isn't an industry expert. Ideally, your content should be simply enough so that someone with no background in your field would have no problem understanding what it says.

4. Develop and Follow a Marketing Strategy: A marketing strategy allows you to have a final goal in mind to work towards regarding your target demographic, amount of social media or blog postings per day, what your created content is supposed to do and how you rectify problems when content doesn't perform as expected. It's an ever evolving plan, but an initial strategy needs to be formulated before it can grow into itself.

5. Leverage the Power of Infographics: In the last couple years, Infographics have made up a large portion of content produced and shared on social media. The reason is simple. Infographics utilize the power of both a graphical presentation and a text-based interface to catch the reader's attention and draw them into the content. This combined medium is far more effective than its disparate parts.

6. Prioritize: The thing that many startup marketing strategies fail to take into account is how important prioritizing is. In any sort of business, your most important resource is time. To manage your time properly you need to be aware of what needs to be done first and balance it with what has the most impact on your audience. Peter Drucker once summed it up by saying, "There’s nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that shouldn’t be done at all."

7. Figure Out Your Social Networking Channels: There are hundreds of millions of users across dozens of social networking channels and as a startup, and your time dedicated to social media is already at a premium. Understanding you can't cover all the possible avenues is the first thing you must come to grips with. Some background research can then direct you to the social media network where the majority of your target demographic dwells, allowing you to focus on that one.

8. Link Building: Modern day link building requires proper understanding of how anchor tags work and how you can best utilize them to increase your search engine rank. Link relevancy is key in figuring out which sites are best linked to. Tools such as Mozbar allow you to quickly ascertain if a link is good by glancing at the DA score. This is important because these links affect how relevant a site YOU are to your niche.

9. Keep Your Content Relevant: If you're focusing on a particular topic in your niche, then do everything that that topic covers. Creating content is how you attract new users and make sure that your site doesn't stagnate. These also feed into the idea of generating good backlinks to go with good content. Together these things are very helpful for a site's final page rank.

10. Analytics are your Friend: The numbers don't lie and the relevant numbers to you are the ones that tell of your page's successes and failures. While successes are important to celebrate, failures allow you to improve your site. Analytics gives you goals to aim for and are a pretty good guide as to how effective your marketing strategy has been thus far and what could be improved in the future.

Hit the Ground Running

In 2015 the landscape surrounding content marketing is likely to become a lot more competitive. That's why it's important for startups to understand how good content can affect their SEO results, leading them to develop strategies that can help them grow rapidly early on. Your mission as a startup should be clear and by concentrated application of tested SEO principles, your startup can achieve what it set out to do and much, much more.