What startups need to know about SEO and domain names

SEO is a huge part of a business’s overall online reputation, and every startup needs to go through it as well.

If you are a startup, you cannot simply ignore the crucial factors of your business i.e. the domain name of your website and its SEO strategy.  So, what does your startup need to know about SEO and domain names? Let’s find out.

Choose the right domain name that reflects your brand

To begin with, always appropriately name your startup business. It is important to consider the foundation of your startup and what it stands for, bearing in mind that this name will be your startup’s first and sometimes only impression, especially when it comes to funding.

Once you have arrived at a business name for your startup, your next big challenge would be to decide on the domain name. A domain name carries a lot of value in terms of your website’s digital marketing aspect as well as the first impression of your business. So, choosing the domain name can just be as challenging as choosing the niche of your startup.

A short and simple domain name that preferably carries the name of your brand is highly recommended. A long domain number or the one with numbers is a strict no-no. A unique domain name with sensible extension based on the nature of your business operations can do better for you. A “.com” extension is still preferred by many and it has its own SEO benefits. Including your keywords can help you rank better in search engines.

If you are having a difficult time arriving upon your ideal domain name, you can seek help from several tools available such as DomainIt, Domainsbot, NameStation etc.

Target the right keywords

Once you have a final thought around the domain name of your startup business, it’s time to jump right into the “keyword” bandwagon. But, make sure that you do that cautiously. Since you are new to the business website competition battlefield, your efforts will require double the throttle to get the engines working.

Using long-tailed keywords is highly recommended if you are a startup. This will make sure that your chances of ranking for a certain service offering/product become higher as compared to the other startups that are not running this strategy.

Obviously, there are great keyword suggestion and research tools available in the market to help you. The Ahrefs Keyword Finder tool helps you discover thousands of great keywords to rank for, analyze their ranking difficulty, and calculate traffic potential. In fact, it is touted to be the most complete keyword research tool on the market. All you need to do is enter up to 10 “seed” keywords into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and you’ll get a huge list with thousands of great keyword ideas.

The KWFinder tool is an easy-to-use keyword research tool that helps you get an idea about the perfect keyword for your new startup business. It features the most accurate keyword difficulty score which makes it simple to find profitable keywords you can really rank for. You can use this tool to get real-time keyword SEO difficulty in one click and expand your keyword research thanks to immediate Google SERP analysis based on specific SEO metrics.

The Google Adword Keyword Tool helps you reach the right customers for your startup business with the right keywords by helping you get keyword ideas to help build your campaigns with the Google Ads Keyword Planner. With this tool, you can discover new Keywords, compare Keyword trends, and start choosing better keywords.

Put up fresh content that imparts value

This should be the most important rule that you should abide by, always. Your startup’s business website exists for a reason; to inform your audience about the content that is relevant to your industry and help them stay posted about the latest updates. Hence, you should create good quality content and put it out for your audience to consume if you really want to stay ahead with the SEO if your website.

Update blogs once a week

If you are aware of the right blogging tips meant for business websites, you probably know that blogs are crucial for the well-being of your website. If you are a startup business that has recently rolled out their business website or are planning to do so, make sure that you blog at least once a week so that the Search engines stay in the loop and keep your site indexed.

Bonus tips

• Don’t forget to take care of your site’s On-Page and Off-Page SEO optimization.
• Create a strong link profile for your website so that you can accomplish a good amount of internal linking and also receive external links to and from your site. A great link profile is a huge SEO booster for your startup’s business website.
• Use of the right SEO audit tools is just as important as everything else, regardless of the site builders in use. These SEO Audit tools such as SEMRush, Screaming Frog, Majestic SEO gauge your SEO strategy and help you have an idea of what you might be missing.
• Your startup can scale the competition and gain brownie points in terms of SEO by abiding by the responsive web design. Hence, put efforts in the direction to making your website mobile-friendly and highly responsive.
• Last but not the least, pay attention to your site’s speed. Your startup’s website should not take more than 2 seconds to load. Always invest in a reliable Web hosting service provider.
• Your site’s user experience will bring a new set of audience to your site and retain the existing ones. So, never underestimate their prominence.

Conclusion

Even if you are a freshly-brewed startup business, your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy remains to be the heart of your online success. Good content, high SERP rankings, and satisfied customers will be the ones to take your startup to a more established phase of its being. Hence, if you are a startup,  SEO can provide you the much-needed edge and maximum leverage more than anything else. This also makes it imperative for you to understand a lot about SEO and also how domain names can make or break your game.