Startup mistake #1: Hiring an SEO agency!
I personally won’t recommend any startup owner to hire an outside agency to handle your SEO. Since Startup products or services are often in flux, instead of hiring a whole new team for SEO spend some hours reading up on SEO basics for Startups. Remember your website is too much of an asset to risk in the hands of an SEO that won’t be honest with you. And you can not rely upon someone else other than your own self for the criticality of your long term success that highly depends upon SEO.
Startup mistake #2: not single person responsible for SEO!
There’s no better day than today to start implementing your SEO strategy. Someone in your company needs to take the responsibility to own the results from SEO. This one person should be capable enough of driving all relevant SEO metrics. So if you are the responsible one in your team then you must be talking to your early customers, right? You can turn their questions into a detailed blog post. Make this as your habit and post at least 2 posts every week to show people that you are not dead.
Startup mistake #3: No knowledge of your top money keywords!
With the “money” term I would like to highlight those phrases that convert best in Google/Bing or Yahoo for your startup. As a startup owner you should have a clear idea of the words that your customers might use to find your product. You should decide on the top 5 key phrases that you wish your website was #1 result for in Google. To decide on your top 5 money keywords you can make use of variety of online tools like Google keyword planner or SEMRush.
Startup mistake #4: Keeping SEO in a lonely silo!
So you ensure a great amount of organic traffic coming to your website but it is broken and has no clear call to action. It is indeed a waste of time and resources as well. You need optimization for search traffic that includes:
- Good website design to attract links and convert traffic better.
- Proper goal conversion tracking so that you can know what keywords and traffic sources are converting the best.
- Ensure a good social presence over G+, Facebook, Twitter etc.
- Building offline connections.
Startup mistake #5: Thinking SEO is easy!
If SEO is that easy then your site must be in the top ranking of search engine.isn’t it? Never believe someone who says SEO is easy though the theory of SEO is easy but its implementation is quite tedious. Getting results from SEO is really a hard nut to crack and require a smart brain. It requires bundle of right tools with bunch of smart analytical skills to fetch results from a SEO strategy.