SEO for a New Business – 7 Strategies to Take You to the Top of the SERPs

Let’s face it.

The world of business has become cutthroat. Especially when it comes to launching and marketing a new business or product.

With big players commanding the lion’s share of the market, it’s easy for you to feel like a tadpole among sharks. Daunting as it may seem, getting your new business to rank well on the search engines is doable. All you need to do is employ the right strategies.

And that’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today – SEO strategies to help your new business rank. With a new and novel product, it is possible to show up in SEO rankings.

But first…

Importance of SEO for New Businesses

SEO is a discipline as old as the internet itself. And while many have declared it dead, it’s a discipline that every business needs to employ – and an essential one at that.

Here’s why SEO is important and why you must invest time and resources in it:

Brand and Product Awareness

One of the most important reasons you need SEO is that it’s an excellent strategy for increasing your brand awareness. And if you’re launching a new product, it can help you drive product awareness.

That’s because SEO, executed properly, will help you get many eyeballs on your new business/product. 

Lead Generation

The core function of SEO is to drive traffic to your business website. But not just any kind of traffic – relevant traffic. This means visitors to your website who are likely to turn into customers.

This is lead generation.

And as you well know, leads are the lifeblood of every business. Without good leads, your bottom line will plateau, or worse, tank.

Overtake the Competition

Need to beat your competition?

SEO can help you do that.

By having a robust SEO strategy, you can catch up and even overtake your competition – even the old guards in your niche. A well orchestrated SEO strategy can help you drive valuable traffic to your website, resulting in your revenue going up.

How?

By implementing the 7 SEO strategies below. So, let’s get to them, shall we?

7 SEO Strategies to Help Your New Business Rank Well

Ready to push your new business to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs)?

Then let’s get to it, shall we?

1. Build an SEO-friendly Website

The first step in ensuring your new business stands a chance of ranking well on SERPs is building an SEO-friendly website. This is a website that is easily accessible and indexable by search engines and is known as the practice of Technical SEO.

Some qualities of such a technically sound website include:

  • Mobile responsiveness
  • XML sitemap
  • Meaningful page structure
  • Fast load speed
  • Optimized URLs (descriptive and unique for each page)
  • Images optimized for SEO (lightweight and with ALT text)

An SEO-friendly website is the gateway to online success, especially for a new business. Don’t just focus on aesthetics when building your website. Instead, make sure your website is also functional and, especially, SEO-friendly.

2. Conduct Competitor Research

One mistake many new businesses make with their SEO strategy is to neglect to research their competitors. Especially if your business is new, you must check out what the competition is doing. Find out:

  • What’s working for them (keywords, backlinks, content, etc.)
  • What’s not working 
  • Any gaps you can exploit

This is valuable information that will help you better position yourself for success. It will also help you reverse engineer the aspects of their strategy that are working and implement them in your strategy.

The biggest advantage of competitor research is that you don’t have to re-invent the proverbial wheel. And you don’t have to guess at which keywords and content types work best for your target audience. You get all that data from checking out your competitors. And no, you don’t need a connection in the CIA to pull this off. All you need is a good competitor analysis tool.

3. Create SEO Optimized Content 

You’ve probably heard it a gazillion times – content is king. The simple reason for that is that content plays a huge role in SEO. 

That’s why you must invest in SEO optimized content if your new business is to succeed at climbing to the top of the SERPs. It’s also why every business needs to start a blog.

So, what does SEO optimized content look like?

Includes Target Keywords

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO optimized content. Be careful, however, not to keyword stuff. Instead, aim for a keyword density that’s between 1%-3%. 

For a new business, we advise that you research untapped keyword opportunities. These are usually long-tail keywords that have more than two words in them. Research proves that more than 50% of all search queries are done so using long-tail keywords.

As for placement, make sure your keywords are in:

  • Your Headline
  • The first and last 150 words of your content
  • Your headers
  • In the posts URL

Well Formatted

Format your content with HTML tags. These are H1, H2, H3, etc., headings. They make your content easier to read for search engines and readers alike.

Besides HTML tags, make sure to use: 

  • Short sentences and paragraphs
  • Bullet points
  • Images

Doing so makes your content punchy and easy to read.

Has Internal and External Links

A linking strategy is crucial to creating SEO optimized content. Both external and internal links must be strategically built to give your content a good chance of ranking well.

Meets Google’s E.A.T Standards

This simply means your content must be:

  • Expertly written
  • Authoritative
  • Trustworthy

Creating SEO-optimized content should be the core of your SEO strategy as a new business (even more important for SaaS brands). It will help you be more visible as well as give you an opportunity to educate your target audience about your business. 

4. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice queries have fast become popular thanks to smartphones and voice-activated devices. That’s why you must also optimize for voice search. Don’t worry; it’s not as difficult as it sounds. You mainly have to focus on creating content that:

  • Answers questions (FAQ pages are great for this)
  • Use conversational language in your content
  • Optimize your Google My Business (GMB) page
  • Focus on long-tail keywords and phrases
  • Create location-specific content (most voice queries are location specific)

With the IoT revolution gaining momentum, voice queries are fast becoming more popular than typed queries. Position your new business well by optimizing for voice search.

5. Build Quality Backlinks

Another important ranking factor that can’t be overemphasized when creating an SEO strategy for your new business is building backlinks. That’s because backlinks signify to search engines that your website and content are trusted sources of information.

So how do you build backlinks to your new business website?

Here are some strategies you can use, especially on a shoestring budget:

  • Guest post. Creating content that you publish on websites other than your own is the easiest way to build quality backlinks.
  • Create link-worthy content. This is content others won’t hesitate to link to. A great example is original research.
  • Participate in blog round ups. This is content created by many contributors chipping in.

Quality backlinks may take time to build, but they always pay off. 

6. Don’t Ignore Metadata

Metadata is the information that shows on SERPs when your website comes up for queries. It’s mainly made up of two elements:

Title Tag

This is the headline that shows up on SERPs and can sometimes be different from your blog post/article’s main headline. Make sure to optimize it by:

  • Including your target keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible
  • Keeping it within a 60 character limit (characters after this are truncated)

Meta Description

This is the short description that appears below your title tag. An optimized one makes it easy for search engines and readers to know what your page is all about. A few ways to optimize it include:

  • Using your target keyword in the description
  • Keeping it within a 165 character limit
  • Use action words to encourage clicks
  • Show the value of reading the post

Never let search engines automatically generate your metadata. Optimize them yourself to increase the chances of ranking well.

7. For Brick-and-Mortar Businesses – Optimize for Local SEO

If your new business is a brick-and-mortar establishment, you still need to have a web presence. One that is optimized for local SEO so as to drive foot traffic. Here are a few ways to optimize for local SEO:

  • Optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing
  • Identify and optimize for local search terms
  • Create location-specific content – especially on critical pages like your Home, About, and Service pages
  • Optimize for voice search
  • Make sure your website is mobile-responsive

Just because your business depends on physical foot traffic doesn’t mean you should ignore SEO. Especially since research shows that about 88% of people research a product online before buying – online or in a physical store.

SEO for New Businesses – Ranking High is Possible

Just because your business is new doesn’t mean it should languish in the digital doldrums. By taking proactive action and optimizing for SEO, you can gain a lot of traction that will result in increased brand awareness and more leads.

If you have a revolutionary product or service that you need help getting out there and aren’t sure what next steps to take, RevenueZen is a proven B2B SEO Agency and we’d love to help.