SEO or Search Engine Optimization may seem daunting and mysterious to some. Well, let us take the mystery, or better yet – the jargon out of it, and look at it in the plain simple way we marketers do by calling it – ‘Search’.
What is ‘Search’?
Let’s say someone was Googling ‘lemon chicken recipe’, and you have a blog with all kinds of yummy recipes with one of them being the answer to this search query. You would obviously want your lemon chicken blog post to pop up as one of the first results on Google. But for anyone to find your recipe, you need to rank above all the other blogs or websites or vlogs which also have a recipe for lemon chicken. It’s not easy. This is what SEO is all about. This is why SEO is important for your business.
While a majority of online searches start on Google – 75 percent to be precise, you might want to optimize your blog or website for the search queries that people type in the search engine of their choice.
Simple SEO Tips For Startups
SEO is tricky in general for all businesses, but it turns into a bigger challenge when it comes to startups. Now although search engines should be favoring ads and monetization, what they also do is give priority to the user experience. Take Google for instance. Google is a search engine that favors history. So everytime startups think they have found a loophole and land on the first few results of the search, the algorithm changes.
Don’t think of search engines as machines. Think of them as human beings with standards and values. Someone who values the users more, protects them and treats them like a guest, compared to the advertiser with whom he values but mostly means business. Still SEO is highly beneficial to a start-up business.
Google for example doesn’t care whether you are a startup, an important financial institution, an NGO or a local retailer. It only cares about matching the right content to the query that has been searched. If you had to type ‘SEO Tips for established businesses’ on search you might have not landed on this blog. But because you typed ‘SEO tips for small businesses’ or ‘SEO tips for startups’, you are here.
Here’s what you need to provide, for a search engine to rank your business higher:
Tip 1: Are you reachable?
Accessibility: Before search engines can rank your pages, they need to be able to access them. Your digital marketing agency in Mumbai can easily take care of this.
Tip 2: Are you making sense?
Quality content: This means relevant, unique and useful content that provides the answers users are looking for when they type in a query.
Tip 3: Are you easy to understand?
Great user experience (UX): Your website is an extension of the search experience and Google wants to see great UX from your pages.
Tip 4: Do you encourage conversations?
Engagement: Quality content and great UX should keep users on your site. Users engaging with your content, is precisely what search engines want to see.
Tip 5: Do you fancy report cards?
Analytics: You need to be tracking what is working for you and what is not. Web analytics are an important part of SEO. You should have them in place at the very start of this SEO exercise.
Top SEO tips for businesses:
If you have already jumped the band-wagon or if you’re trying to stay in the game with SEO tips to boost your sales, this section is meant for you. These tips are in continuation with the first five.
Tip 6: Be quick:
Speed is everything. Remove anything that prevents your website from loading quickly.
Tip 7: Be selfless:
Make sure your website links to other sites as well. As weird as it sounds, it is good practice for growth in SEO. This way you will let the search engines know that you genuinely want to help the user.
Tip 8: Be human:
If you are writing in a way to just get the search engine to notice, by stuffing irrelevant keywords here and there in your content, Google’s going to know. So the best thing you can do for your brand is write meaningful content for the benefit of your user. SEO should be your writer’s second priority.
Tip 9: Be trustworthy:
Do other websites trust you? To prove this you need to make sure other websites link back to your page too. These are called inbound links. Think of this as your search engine’s way of asking your neighbors if you have a criminal record or if you’re clean.
Tip 10: Be presentable:
Bank on an SEO Agency in Mumbai for this one. Get all the optimization essentials in place, that will make pages easy for search engines and users to understand.
Loved our tips? Give us a shout out at aniketh@mindstorm.in.
