When you start a new Company from the ground up, you have so many new challenges; but you also have the opportunity to build a new website with just the right structure to benefit from 100% of search engine marketing and generate new customers for your service.
Let me warn you – there is shortcut, trick or magic to search engine marketing. It is only hard work that will help you succeed in getting new customers with SEO for your new Company. Now, let’s check the essentials steps that you need to work on:
1) Keyword Research: First of all, you absolutely need to take your time and review the keyword or phrase that best represent your startup, so that people searching in Google, Yahoo or Bing can find your product or service easily.
There are a lot of tools that can help you, but the best is Google Keyword Tool from Google Adwords. Another thing that will also help your keyword strategy is choosing the ones that have more search volume for getting more clients in the future.
For example, if you are working in “Car Insurance” for keywords you will focus on: “car insurance quotes”, “car insurance coverage”, “auto insurance comparison”, etc.
2) Site Structure: Once you have defined the keywords that will represent your service, you need to work on your site. Start by defining your URLs, titles and the text in your site with your keywords. Pay attention to the small details like assigning the keywords to your image alt tags. And don’t forget about the internal link strategy with a good anchor text.
Remember, you need to work hard on this, because every decision you make right now will last almost forever with your startup. You will be able to make changes, but it will cost you a lot in your SERP rankings. One excellent source for learning all the basics of search engine marketing and more is the community of Moz where you can find curated content from experts in this area.
3) Relationships: Now that you have everything settled, you need to get out there. Start by contacting your family and friends, listen to their feedback about your service and improve it, you will learn things that simply didn’t occur to you. Your process should be as Eric Ries teaches at The Lean Startup: ”Listen to your customers and iterate from there.”
Now, going back to SEO, you will have to contact bloggers and journalists in your niche. For example, in “Car Insurance”, we could start by contacting every single industry-relevant person on the web and showing your service and its’ benefits. Always try to give something back, for example a contest with prizes where users will have the chance to win one year of free car insurance.
Every link / share on facebook / tweet in twitter / +1 in Google Plus will represent a vote of confidence for search engines in order to rank your site better in their results and the results of this are obvious: more customers and therefore more revenue for your startup.
This is a long journey with a lot of hard work. Remember: no shortcuts and no tricks. In an offline business, it takes a long time to get a lot of customers, profits and possibly more time to become famous. Online it is exactly the same but with new rules.
Author
Computer Engineer Christian Rennella is working as a Co-Founder at elMejorTrato.com Service Compare Engine in Argentina. Now adding Brazil, México and Colombia with oMelhorTrato.com. The company is four years old , it has twenty one employees and now is opening new offices in Colombia and México.
