Starting a business can be a ton of work, but a really exciting step in life. In this article, we’ll discuss why SEO should be a top priority for your new business with examples of how to get started.
Key Takeaways & Strategies
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SEO is key for any business as most of us resort to the search engines when looking for a product or service.
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Some strategies for new business include targetting a niche set of keywords, writing good content related to your space, and generating backlinks through content or news sites.
Why SEO is Key
SEO, search engine optimization, is so critical for any business in the digital age. When people look for a certain product or service they tend to look to the search engines for answers, so showing up at the top of the results is critical. When starting a business, we have lots of things on our mind and SEO should be at the top of the list. What good is our new business if no one can find us? As the adage goes, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? We want your business to make a splash and get found so we’ll talk through some ways to get started in SEO.
SEO Example: Foot Massagers
Let’s step inside the shoes of a new business owner who is launching an online business for foot massagers. This is a really competitive market but we believe we have the best product the market has seen. We go out and develop our foot massager and now it is time to start selling. We build a great website with an easy checkout, and now we need to get found. There are lots of options out there for paid marketing including Google Ads, Facebook ads, and more but we are on a relatively tight budget as a startup and want to try and compete for some organic volume. Let’s walk through a couple of ways we can do this.
Target a Niche
I am not a podiatrist and know very little about feet so I will make up a silly example here to explain this point. The market for foot massagers is very large and we will likely struggle to break in right away but the market for foot massagers for people with wide feet might be a little bit smaller and underserved. A good business and SEO strategy might be to focus our site and marketing towards a specific niche that we can more easily reach, like in this case people with wide feet. So we can go into our site and add things like “great for wide feet,” “foot massagers for wide feet,” and more related things to tailor our site towards that search. Now when someone searches for foot massagers for wide feet, we might actually show up. While the search volume might be 100/month vs 10,000/month, we actually have a chance at ranking and converting on that smaller population.
Write Great Content
As we generally know with SEO, content is king. If we want Google to recognize us as authoritative, trustworthy, and expert then we need to have high-quality, relevant content. Now that we have our awesome foot massager product, let’s think about content that would be relevant to that audience. We could start with articles about the benefits of a daily foot massage, different strategies for relieving tension in the feet, different types of foot problems and how to work with them, and more. If we build out good content related to the topic and demonstrate our expertise and authority in the world of feet and foot massagers then we’ll have a better chance at showing up atop the search engine results.
Backlinks
This is one of the most challenging things in SEO, but can sometimes be easier as a new business because of the novelty factor. A core element of off-page SEO is developing backlinks from reputable sites that indicate to the search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality. When launching a new business, we may have the advantage of being new where other sites might be interested in trying or writing about our new launch. We can use this opportunity to reach out to related businesses or blogs and have them try out the product or feature the product somewhere on the site for us to start building some backlinks. This will be tremendously valuable to establish a footing (no pun intended) in the SEO game.
