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The trick with SEO strategies for start-up companies is getting results fast. Start-ups face a significantly greater challenge than larger established companies, mainly due to the fact that they simply don’t have the budget to dedicate to long term optimisation campaigns. For this reason, taking shortcuts is extremely tempting for start-up businesses. This article will explain why this approach is unlikely to be effective. What are Search Engines Looking For? Search engines such as Google don’t make any distinction between tiny start-up companies and massive multinational corporations. Their only goal is to ensure that their users find good content that is most relevant to their search query. To this end, Google is concerned with quality; content that is relevant, original, well-crafted and useful to the user will generally fare better in the search engine rankings. User experience (UX) is an extension of this aim, as Google wants its users to have a positive interaction with the pages it serves in its SERPs. This makes readers more likely to engage longer and also become ‘repeat visitors’, which broadly speaking is what search engines are looking to achieve. Another important criteria for search engines is that of accessibility – navigation strategy should make it easy and intuitive for both users and spiders to manoeuvre websites and find information quickly. The marketing aims of a business website do not determine the rankings of any of its pages in the SERPs. Search engines have their own agenda which is articulated in their algorithms and this is worth keeping in mind. The challenge of the start-up is to grow online site visibility as quickly as possible in order to compete with the big boys, and without blowing limited resources. Effective but affordable SEO is the name of the game. This means being smart about the way SEO campaigns are conducted and maximising efficiency by meeting the fundamentals of Google’s optimisation demands. How Do Search Engines Decide What Makes a Page Optimal? Naturally, it is important that start-up owners know how Google’s algorithm looks at the assets of pages on a website and how it decides their rankings. Keyword enriched content (KEC) remains a central theme in search engine algorithms. Deploying the search term a few times in the text of the page helps to indicate to Google that it is relevant to that phrase. However, Google is regularly updating the way its algorithms work and there have been some very interesting developments in recent times. Whilst key phrase focus is still very important, Google has now integrated machine-learning into its algorithms and this enables it to match the topical relevance of content to the contextual meaning behind user searches. Another important ranking factor considered by Google is the backlink portfolio. The quality and quantity of links is an indication of the standing of a website. Great content that is engaging and interesting for a wide audience stands a good chance of naturally earning links from highly reputable sites such as leading industry journals or national newspapers. These links are extremely valuable and can do wonders for the SEO of smaller start-up companies. Factors such as loading times, ease of navigation and secure encryption (SSL) are also used to judge the UX on-site, while bounce rates and average time spent on a page are a useful indicator of how engaging content is. Location might also be an important consideration. Obviously this one depends on the nature of the start-up and the geographical market that it operates in. So for example if you are running an SEO agency, London could be the most relevant market for you if this is where you are based and if you are unable or unwilling to take on clients from elsewhere. For this reason, you would probably wish to be found by people who are searching ‘SEO agency London’. Therefore it is probably prudent to key phrase enrich your relevant landing page with the term ‘SEO agency London’ and you may find that using location data is a highly effective way of exposing your pages to those potential customers. This factor can be crucial in terms of relevance and is definitely worth thinking about. What Makes Great Optimised Content for Start-Ups? Google algorithms reward those sites that avoid cutting corners with low quality content, weak backlink portfolios or overtly prioritising monetisation over user experience. The best content is consistently valuable, engaging and actionable. For the latter, this amounts to the ability of your copy to convert leads into sales. Visual appeal and excellent salesmanship are crucial here. This in turn helps a page to earn links. Remember that the purpose of any search marketing that you carry out is to generate relevant traffic and then to make sure that your pages that are found actually convert that traffic into leads and sales. Conducting an affordable SEO campaign that brings results within a short period of time is a tough task, but this is the golden ticket for start-ups. Successfully optimising landing pages can help a site compete with its biggest competitors in SERPs. There is certainly a lot to think about and if it proves too great an ask for start-ups to begin this in house, there are expert agencies out there that can offer affordable SEO packages to spark an optimisation campaign to life. Author Plate Kit Jones works for LeadGeneratorsDigital, a successful and professional SEO agency. London is home to many online marketing companies, but LeadGeneratorsDigital is the one to choose if your business needs a boost. Their content marketing skills and comprehensive SEO packages promise to not only improve your webpage rankings, but also the overall quality of your site.
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