A guide to SEO for startup founders and marketers

Learn all about the benefits of SEO and how to get started with SEO to boost your search engine visibility and sales.

When was the last time you clicked on page 10 of Google’s search results?

If you’re like most people, you probably stick to the first three results to get answers to your search queries. Those results were served first because Google and other search engines determined them to be search-optimized for visitors like you. And if those websites had products to sell, apps to download, or email lists to subscribe to, you were more likely to convert on those than on websites on pages two and beyond.

Welcome to the wonderful world of SEO.

If you're looking to build your brand presence online, an SEO strategy can be a powerful tool in your toolkit. In this SEO guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about how to leverage the benefits of SEO for your early-stage startup.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's the process of increasing the visibility of your website or landing page in search engine results. SEO is crucial when your website or landing page is competing against thousands of others for top rankings and can help you get more traffic and sales.

What is SEO not?

SEO is not a magic bullet that will save your company, but a strategy that needs to be paired with other content marketing techniques to achieve best results.

Done right, an SEO strategy can expose your website and content to more eyes, but there are other factors that go into successfully converting a customer, such as:

The user experience on your website
The nature of your offer
The ease of purchase

Done wrong, you might end up with search engine penalties in the form of lower search rankings. Things that can attract penalties include keyword stuffing (overusing a keyword to try and game search engines), duplicating content, and slow page loading speeds.

What are the benefits of SEO for startups?

There are four main benefits of SEO for companies, namely greater visibility, increased organic traffic, reduced costs-per-click, and increased conversions.

The primary benefit of SEO is search engine visibility. When you employ the right SEO techniques on your website, you can expect a steady increase in organic traffic as new users find and consume your content via search. The more in-depth your content is, the longer users spend on your website, which sends a signal to Google's algorithm that your content is valuable — which increases your search ranking.

The more your content resonates, the higher the likelihood your content shows up in search — and the less you have to rely on paid ads to bring in new traffic. This means you’re spending less to bid on certain keywords and acquiring targeted customers cheaper (thus lowering your customer acquisition costs) and keeping more of your margin on each product sold.

And if your content is evergreen, you can keep reaping the benefit of your investment in SEO and content marketing indefinitely. Evergreen content is content that enjoys a constant level of sustained interest throughout the year. When you pair evergreen content marketing with other marketing strategies like email and social media marketing, you can enjoy a significant increase in conversions and audience growth over time.

There are three types of SEO: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Let’s explore the difference between all three.

Section #1: On-page SEO efforts

On-page SEO involves optimizing the copy and images on your website. While SEO is commonly thought of as link building, there are several steps you can take to improve your website before ever seeking out a single backlink.

The most important thing you can do for on-page SEO is to create great content that answers the questions people search for related to your product. The better your content is, the more likely other people will link to it — and each backlink boosts your search rankings.

SEO is largely driven by target keywords. People find content by searching for specific keywords, while search engines determine the topic of a webpage by looking at the most used keywords on the page (among other factors like the title and meta description).

Your content should be written around keywords specific to your brand, product, or location. For example, if you sell vegan burgers, consider writing web pages and blog posts that include or are about the following keywords:

vegan restaurant in [city]
vegetarian hamburger
vegan burger recipe
plant-based burger
best vegan burger
vegetarian burger
vegan hamburger
veggie burger
tofu burger

If you’re not sure what cluster of keywords you should focus on, try out popular keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Ubersuggest, or KeywordTools.org.

The ideal word count for a web page varies depending on who you ask, but use 300+ words for web pages and 1,000+ words for blog posts as a benchmark. Why? Longer pages give you more room to insert more of the right keywords (known as keyword density) and to go in-depth on a topic. But don’t just make your page longer for the sake of search engines — keep your human readers in mind.

There are a few other factors to keep in mind when writing content optimized for SEO, such as:

1. Title tag

Your title tag informs both readers and search engine robots what your content is all about, and also compels human readers to click on it. As such, your title tag needs to be both keyword-relevant and psychologically compelling. For example, “8 Profitable Ways SEO Can Grow Your Small Business” is a more specific title tailored to search intent than merely going with “SEO Business Growth Tips,” even though both titles convey the same idea.

2. Heading tags

Heading tags such as H1, H2, and H3 tags are a simple way to structure your content into a coherent hierarchy and tell search engines what to crawl. For example:

This H2 heading is about animals

We might use this section to set up what the reader can expect to find when they continue reading — say, to introduce information about how the animal kingdom is made up of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, and insects.

This H3 heading is specifically about birds

We might use this section to talk about the 40 different types of birds known to science, and further subdivide this section into H4 headings for turkeys, kingfishers, roadrunners, etc.

3. URL structure

Choose a URL structure that is easy to understand and keyword-friendly. Shorter URLs are better than longer URLs and should ideally contain one or more of the keywords you are trying to rank for through that piece.

An example of a good URL structure would be:

https://www.olivinemarketing.com/articles/brand-story

A not-so-optimal example would be:

https://www.olivinemarketing.com/articles/content/2021/brand-story658655962

4. Description tags

The meta description tag describes the contents of your page. Google displays this description in the search engine results underneath your page's title. A meta description tag should be between 50-160 characters and contain your most relevant keywords.

5. Internal linking

Linking internally to your other content can help with SEO as Google and other search engines see this as a sign of good content structure. For example, you can write about debt and link to other posts on your website about credit cards and budgeting to drive traffic between all three pieces of content.

6. Canonical tags

A canonical tag (rel=“canonical”) on a web page tells search engines that the page is actually a copy of another web page (the original), and any link equity should be directed to that source. If your website has duplicate pages, a canonical tag can help search engines know which version of a page is the correct one to index.

7. Image titles and alt text

The title of an image should describe the image and include the keywords you want to rank for. It’s also good practice to add alt text to images on your website, as they are used for accessibility purposes and greatly help those with visual impairments to understand what an image is all about. Alt tags also appear within the HTML image container when the media file fails to display correctly.

8. Image sizes

The size of your images determines your web page load speed and the amount of data your visitors will use to browse your website. We advise keeping your images to under 200 KB where you can to keep your page load times low and reduce your bounce rate.

Now that you know what on-page SEO is, what about SEO activities that take place off of your website? Here's where off-page SEO comes into play.

Section #2: Off-page SEO efforts

Off-page SEO refers to optimizations that happen outside of your website which contribute to your search engine ranking. These include the following six elements:

Link building
Reviews
Public relations
Local SEO
Influencer marketing
Content syndication

Let's look at each of these off-page SEO optimizations in detail.

1. Link building

A large aspect of SEO is building links back to your website. Great content is one way to achieve quality backlinks, but there are other tactics such as:

Guest posting, where you write content on another blog and link back to your original content. Publishers are always hungry for new content, and high-quality content submissions are more likely to be accepted. You can use tools like Google Search Console to figure out which sites have linked to you before and reach out to them with an offer to write compelling new content for their blog.
Frequent posts to and engagement with social media platforms and online forums, where you join relevant conversations around your brand, product, or topic and tactfully insert links back to your content in those conversations. Beyond just the SEO factor, joining relevant conversations on social media and community forums is a great way to build credibility, establish authority, and grow your audience. You can start by finding the right hashtags on your social media platform of choice (e.g., #SEO, #SocialMediaMarketing, #VoiceNarrations, etc.) and contribute to those conversations in a helpful, non-pushy way.

2. Reviews

Reviews are another great way for people to find your product online. Depending on what you’re selling, you might find a review (or several) of your product on sites like TrustPilot, G2, and Capterra. Get onto those platforms and engage with your reviewers to find out what can be improved to net you a 5-star rating. These ratings show up in search engine results, and low ratings could hurt your credibility, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

You can get ahead of this by asking customers for feedback in-app (if you’re a software company), in-store (if you sell physical goods or services), or at any other point where you have direct access to the customer.

3. Public relations

Public relations within an SEO context is about getting your business media coverage on third-party platforms that link back to your website. Public relations involves pitching journalists, editors, and bloggers about your product using a compelling angle that will deliver value for their readers while informing them about something newsworthy you’ve done, like a product launch or a fresh round of funding you’ve raised.

As with guest-posting, media publications are always on the lookout for fresh content that will resonate with their readers. When pitching, include the angle, target audience, suggested headline, word count, and any other pertinent information an editor would require to make an informed decision.

For bloggers, get in touch with them via email, Twitter, or another appropriate channel and tell them why you think their audience will be interested in your content. Consider offering them something in exchange for their coverage like a product giveaway, preferential pricing, or tickets to your next event.

4. Local SEO efforts

Local SEO makes you visible to people searching for products or services within their local area. An example of a general search query would be “plumbing services.” Contrast this to a local search for “plumbing services Toronto” where the searcher is looking for someone specifically in their area.

You can take advantage of this by setting up your Google My Business account and filling in your name, website, contact details, physical location (if applicable), and operating hours. You can do the same for any other online business directories in your area to ensure they all link back to your website.

5. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing involves asking people with big followings to share your content and product with their fans and followers. Because influencers have a large following, partnering with them to promote your product is an incredibly effective marketing tactic. There are different influencer tiers, with some influencers classified as “nano influencers” (1,000-10,000 followers), “micro-influencers” (10,000-50,000 followers), and mega influencers (1,000,000 followers and above).

6. Content syndication

Content syndication involves republishing your content to other sites to expose your brand to new audiences and drive more traffic. Syndication is a low-cost way of multiplying the visibility of any piece of content.

The first kind of content syndication is self-syndication, where you republish your content to other platforms where you have channels or accounts. For example, this post will be published to the Olivine blog, then to our Medium publication, and finally to LinkedIn as a LinkedIn Article. Each of these platforms has a different set of readers that will get exposed to this post and share it with their networks.

The second type is earned syndication, where you engage website owners and editors about republishing your content to their websites. It helps to search for outlets that already do this, as they’d already have editorial guidelines in place for syndication. You can search for “originally appeared on” + [your topic] to find sites that have republished content before.

(Source: Ahrefs)

Section #3: Technical SEO efforts

Technical SEO is all about optimizing your website at the back and front end. There are several elements that you can optimize for, including:

Speed. Compress all media and code files on your website for faster loading. You can use a tool like Minify (on WordPress) to compress your website’s Javascript, HTML, and CSS files and a tool like GTMetrix to measure site speed and spot opportunities for improvement.
Security. Ensure your website has secure SSL certificates to encrypt personal data plus other security measures to thwart malicious attempts to access data on your website.
Crawlability. You can define whether or not search engine crawlers can browse and index your web pages. Specify this information for individual pages on your website by using an appropriate SEO plugin (like Yoast SEO plugin), tweaking the right post settings, creating an XML sitemap, or amending your robots.txt file (if you’re a pro who knows what they’re doing).
Link validity. No dead links should appear on your website. If you’re receiving hits for old content that’s no longer on your website, you can set up 301 redirects so that anyone who clicks on the old link(s) gets taken to your latest content.
Content uniqueness. Search engines dislike duplicate content, as they can only index one copy of a page and prefer to index the most recent or most relevant content.
Content structure. Provide search engines with more information about your content that they can display in search results. For example, you can indicate the start and end dates of your events using structured date markup.

Get started with SEO

SEO is a potent way to get discovered by new audiences interested in your brand and products. To win at SEO, you’ll need patience, consistency, and a commitment to ongoing improvements on your website and content. By working on your on-page, off-page, and SEO elements, you’ll be ranking for the top keywords in your niche in no time.

Stuck on how to get started with SEO? Become an FMP member for access to more marketing content and our members-only Slack group to ask questions about your marketing strategy.