{"id":710,"date":"2016-11-26T08:33:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T16:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.canirank.com\/blog\/?p=710"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:50:13","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T18:50:13","slug":"seo-for-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.canirank.com\/blog\/seo-for-startups\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO for Startups – 5 Ways to Use Brains Over Budget"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEO for startups can be challenging. Search engine results heavily favor big brand websites with thousands of links, a recognizable brand name, and virtually\u00a0unlimited budgets for fresh content. Faced with daunting odds and tepid initial results, many startups quickly give\u00a0up on SEO as a viable channel to scale your marketing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That’s a huge mistake.<\/p>\n

In SEO, brains and creativity matter more than marketing budget. <\/a><\/span>Click To Tweet<\/a><\/span>\n

Applied correctly, search engine optimization can be one of the best channels for growth phase startups to achieve traction at a reasonable cost<\/a><\/strong>. Unlike other channels where traffic scales in proportion to budget, in SEO, brains and creativity matter more than budget. Numerous startup success stories such as Mint, Quora, Buffer, HubSpot, Unbounce, OkCupid, Groove, TripAdvisor, or Yelp wouldn’t be half the company they are today without their startup\u00a0SEO strategies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So we know that mastering SEO can skyrocket your startup’s traffic.<\/p>\n

Plus, there’s good news:\u00a0in the past few years, SEO has\u00a0become a lot harder.<\/p>\n

(Yep, that’s good news.)<\/p>\n

It’s good news because Startup SEO is a zero-sum game. The more challenging it becomes, the more opportunities there are for you and I and anyone else willing to put in the work, find the best strategies, and do it right. And right now most companies both large and small are actually pretty terrible at SEO. Some companies have even switched to relying on PPC vs. SEO<\/a>, making the game less competitive. Some ignore SEO while convincing themselves that’s OK because they’re “building for users, not search engines”. (You need to do both<\/a>.) Others haven’t caught up to the reality of modern SEO in a post-Panda\/ Penguin\/ Hummingbird world. But most are just frustrated\u00a0with the loads of conflicting and often self-serving advice from SEO gurus<\/a> and\u00a0just don’t know where to start.<\/p>\n

In this post, we’ll share 5 specific SEO strategies that you can put to use right now to better leverage SEO as a traction channel for your startup, regardless of your size, budget, or industry. Here are the best SEO for small business tactics.<\/p>\n

Startup SEO Strategy #1: Start In a Small Pond<\/h2>\n

\"best<\/p>\n

CanIRank<\/strong> is best described as\u00a0“SEO software<\/a>“, an “SEO tool”, or perhaps a “keyword research tool.” But we know that if we tried to compete for those keywords as a young Search engine startup site going up against much more established players, we wouldn’t have a chance. As one of many SEO tools for startups, the CanIRank Keyword Report shows us that the typical website ranking for “SEO software” has several hundred thousand links and very high Website Strength<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"startups<\/a><\/p>\n

That kind of trust and authority isn’t built overnight even with the best SEO strategy and truckloads\u00a0of VC cash. And it definitely requires more than a cursory look at the data found in your Google Search Console.<\/p>\n

So instead of wasting our SEO startup\u2019s resources by trying to fight a battle we can’t win, we applied SEO for Startups Strategy #1<\/em>: start in a small pond. More specifically, break down your overall market into smaller chunks and choose one to focus your SEO efforts on initially<\/strong>. Checking your keyword difficulty<\/a> doesn’t have to be complex.<\/p>\n

\"SEO

As a startup, you need to start by targeting low competition keywords even if they’re not the ones that best describe your business.<\/p><\/div>\n

For CanIRank, we chose to focus on the “keyword difficulty<\/a>” segment of the market. This was a great fit for us because 1) our keyword difficulty feature is light years ahead of the competition<\/a>, and 2) no larger players were trying to rank for “keyword difficulty” with their home page.<\/p>\n

So did it work?<\/p>\n

You can see the results for yourself<\/a>.<\/p>\n

CanIRank still doesn’t have very many links, but by focusing on a single market niche rather than the overall market terms like “SEO”, “SEO software”, “SEO tools” and so on, we’ve managed to get our SEO startup on page 1 in a relatively short period of time.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now that we’re on page 1 for keyword difficulty, we’ll slowly start to expand our territory. Our next move is to begin targeting an adjacent market niche such as “SEO competitor analysis<\/a>“. Once we’re ranking for that we’ll move to another adjacent niche like “keyword research tools<\/a>” or “small business SEO software”. By the time we’re big enough to go after terms like “SEO software”, we’ll have already established a stable of traffic-generating keyword rankings in a number of niches, and our competitors won’t know what hit them.<\/p>\n

SEO for Startups Strategy #2:\u00a0Be a Barnacle<\/h2>\n

\"SEO<\/p>\n

Every week there are literally hundreds of new articles and blog posts published talking about our competitors. And unfortunately for us, most of the\u00a0bloggers and journalists doing the writing haven’t yet heard of CanIRank.<\/p>\n

Eventually, we hope to be featured in those articles. But in the meantime, we have to settle for being a barnacle. Just as barnacles attach themselves to whales for a free ride through the ocean, startups can\u00a0try to attach themselves\u00a0to the press coverage of their\u00a0larger competitors. This is a version of the commonly known\u00a0piggyback marketing technique<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Every time a quality blog post or news article comes out mentioning SEO tools for startups or our competitors, we’ll look for a way to get involved<\/strong>. Maybe\u00a0we’ll make an insightful comment, connect with the blogger\u00a0on Twitter, or send the journalist a note with some additional research they could use in future articles on how to manage SEO.<\/p>\n

In the short term, many people researching your industry who stumble across one of those articles will notice your comments\u00a0and check you out as well. In the long term, the bloggers, journalists and other influencers who write about your industry will become aware of your startup and start including you in their write-ups.<\/p>\n

Sound too time-consuming?<\/p>\n

We thought so too! So we built\u00a0our new Promote my Content tool<\/a> to automate the process of monitoring and evaluating mentions of your keywords or competitors:<\/p>\n

\"link<\/a>

Using the Promote my Content<\/em> tool to find bloggers who wrote about keyword domain names<\/a> so we can promote our new research.<\/p><\/div>\n

Each blog post or news article discovered is scored according to authority, relevancy, and actionability so that you can focus on the ones most likely to drive traffic and boost your SEO.\u00a0Think of it as networking transferred to the digital realm: your goal is to contribute, share, and interact<\/strong> so people want to do business with you, not be obnoxious and overly salesy\u00a0so they hope they’ll never meet you again.<\/p>\n

Still<\/em> sounds too time-consuming?<\/p>\n

You might want to check out one of CanIRank’s\u00a0Full-Service plans<\/a>. Our team of digital marketing specialists is available to help at rates within reach of even the scrappiest bootstrapper, and this is one of the strategies we implement for most of our search startup clients.<\/p>\n

SEO for Startups Strategy #3: Benevolent Gods<\/h2>\n

\"SEO<\/p>\n

The Promote my Content\u00a0tool can also be used to find the most important influencers in your industry: the ones who frequently link to your competitors and share their content. Instead of pitching them a cold ham sandwich, use the Influencer Relationship Building<\/a> process to warm them up a little bit. Make them aware of you and your growing startup:<\/p>\n