SEO For Startups: How To Dominate Competitive SERPs

It is always a bit tight when it comes to handling and budgeting the finances for a startup. You will constantly balance your spending across different strategies and channels to make sure you are getting the most out of the amount invested. 

 

SEO is often considered a slow burner, which is actually true. Every SEO professional will agree that it takes time for SEO to showcase its return on investment. It is a gradual process that eventually builds up to be a significant part of your entire business. And investing in SEO as early as possible for your startup is beneficial for building an acquisition funnel and creating brand visibility and aids in customer retention and customer service. 

Here are some proven SEO Strategies you can utilise early on during your startup's journey to help you grow your business:

 

Content-based on support centre

Usually, you will break the keywords and pages on a site into the top of the funnel or bottom of the funnel based on its importance. This is essential as it helps to match the content as per what the user's intent is. But amongst all of this, the support centre content is neglected. Here, there is no specific focus on the support centre content and is generally dealt with by adding a few FAQs and questions – the typical bottom of the funnel treatment. You do not really put any effort into this type of content.

You will often be hesitant to put good content on a subdomain as various tools will show you that it has a meager search volume. Or maybe it does fit a niche persona that has been identified. While building personas are a great asset for marketing teams, you shouldn't be using them as a go-to guideline when building your marketing networking, especially when working on your SEO. 

When you are writing your support center content, you can take feedback from your customer service team or your sales staff to understand what your customers are asking questions. This way, you can build out support articles based on FAQs. You can also include several niche categories and support articles that would otherwise only be found on forums and posts outside your website.

If your customers are asking questions that are related to your product/service/brand, you should be part of the conversation. Make use of your site's live chat functionality to get to know what your customers are asking you. Find conversations between your sales team and the prospects. Read threads in developer forums.  Hire an SEO expert to get the most out of your support content.

 

Recognising and investing in content based on pain points

When you are establishing yourself as a brand in a hierarchy of already existing brands or you are one of the companies that are building the next generation of a product that is gradually emerging in the market and not yet adopted on a large scale, there is a high chance that your keyword search volumes will be on the lower side. 

Do not be under the misconception that the pain points of your product or service mean explaining its features or solutions. Addressing the features and solutions is always a great idea, but your marketing campaign won't be brief enough to explain everything to your audience. This is where you should be addressing your user's pain points and address them quickly, briefly and efficiently. 

Normally, you would take a keyword with a high search volume and work yourself backward. But what if there's no keyword with a good search volume? And what even if you get a high search volume keyword, but it isn't possible to rank due to the high competition and variables outside of your control? This is where you examine your product in great detail and offer it as a solution. This is where you move off from product features and tag lines and focus more on why your product is the answer to your customers' questions. 

You can create articles and scenarios in which your product is the answer to whatever your customers' pain point is. 

 

Finding the balance between gated and ungated content

Gated content is the one that can generate leads for your business. This can be in the form of whitepapers, webinars, ebooks, etc. Startups will often find it difficult to understand when to create gated content and when not to. This type of content is essential in the marketing ecosystem; however, its existence conflicts between sales and marketing strategies. This happens when gated content is produced using notable search queries and topics. 

In this case, you will get an optimised page with one or two high search volume keywords with little to no user value proposition, along with a lead generation form. This type of content is improbable to drive leads considering your competitors will have ungated content answering all your customers' questions.

With ungated content, you could be looking at building and scaling assets that can be used to attract traffic to your website – traffic that is relevant. And then, you can ask for contact information and build a relationship moving on.

 

Conclusion:

Startups should be formulating SEO strategies as early as possible to stay innovative and agile in the market. This is where you can hire SEO professionals to seek and capitalise on opportunities your competitors might be missing out on.  Hire SEO professionals and let them handle your SEO worries while you focus on getting on top of the competition funnel!