5 Key Benefits of SEO for Startups

SEO or search engine optimization is crucial to the success of most tech startups. Most business owners who decide on starting a tech venture often have little to no idea that a proper SEO strategy helps companies stay above the competition and ensure a steady flow of visitors converted into customers. Although plans for the website structure, type of content and ways of promoting it are important, all that effort is negligible if SEO is not a part of it. With that in mind, let’s go over 5 key ways search engine optimization can benefit young startups.

It provides valuable customer data

You can extract large quantities of valuable information by sifting through search data that can help your startup focus on high demand areas and lucrative niches. SEO can be used to launch new products and services, discover new niches, create and manage successful marketing campaigns and effectively seize new, profitable opportunities. Once you consider the numerous benefits SEO can offer to your startup, you will realize that it’s hardly a cost, but rather a smart investment bound to show positive results. That is, if you optimize your website appropriately.

It allows you to reach your customers more easily

People place their trust in search engines and their results. A website located in the first couple of search engine results pages is, in their eyes, a dependable and trustworthy website. Otherwise, why would it be featured first? Once people have found a website that meets their needs, whether it’s for information or finding a specific product or a service, they will often “brag” about it to their friends and family. This is what advertisers call word-of-mouth marketing and it’s one of many techniques used to get your brand out there and into the mind of an average consumer.

Excellent conversion potential

Most online marketing efforts, including SEO, work by attracting individuals that are already searching for the products and services your company offers. You don’t have to convince them that they need something nor do you have to tell them what that something is. They know and they’re actively looking for it. What you have to do is make sure your company is presented in the first couple of results on the search pages, and once they access your website, convince them that your company is better than the competition. Again, this can be accomplished by various SEO techniques which help guide visitors’ attention, optimize their experience with relatable, valuable content and nurture them into becoming a customer.

Brand awareness and exposure

As we already stated, people tend to trust search engines and their results. And with an adequately performed optimization of your content and website elements, you can influence the search engine algorithm into placing your site at the top of the results. This, in turn, greatly increases brand awareness, as every time people type in their particular query (using the appropriate keywords) they are greeted by your website. Your brand is getting exposure not only from people who are actively searching for particular products and services but even those who were searching for something completely different but still ended up seeing and visiting your website.

Valuable customer insight

A properly optimized website increases credibility, usability, and visibility, all of which directly translate into traffic coming towards your startup. Once you experience a significant increase in traffic, you can use Google Analytics to extract indispensable info, including what browser they’re using, which keywords they’ve typed in to find you, where they’re from, when they’re most active, how much time they’ve spent on your website, which parts of the page they’re focusing on, etc.

All this information can be used to further improve and hone your advertising efforts and come up with strategies that would best incorporate those results. This is where the importance of SEO for small businesses becomes apparent. The more you know about your customers, the better you’ll be at providing them with just the right products and services at just the right time in the buyer’s cycle and significantly increase your ROI.

As you can see, search engine optimization is not an option, but a necessity in today’s marketplace. When set up appropriately, SEO can increase your visibility, strengthen your brand’s influence and increase traffic, lead to increased conversion rates and ROI. However, poorly executed SEO campaign can result in your website getting demoted, or worse, completely omitted from the search results. This is why it may be better to hire a professional company to handle all your SEO efforts, instead of trying to do it by yourself and ultimately doing more harm than good.