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Consider this a beginner guideline for your startup business. This article will be especially helpful to you if you are just starting to invest in SEO & SEM. So, without further ado, let’s begin.

Why SEO Is Valid for Your Small Business?

First of all, why should you invest into SEO? SEO is the modern day indexing tool to make sure your website is almost effortlessly shown to your real potential clients. Don’t get me wrong, it takes time and effort to make sure you properly index your domain name into Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). But once index, and you continuously invest time and money into SEO Expert, your goal of staying on the first page per specific keyword searches will be well worth it.

Why Will It Be Well Worth It?

It’s well worth the time and money you put into SEO, because of multiple reasons. First reason is because you will undoubtedly prove to potential consumers you are a relevant business not just in your community, but in the world. Still for a startup business, local SEO would be your primary approach if you offer a specific product or service in your designated area. If you have an Ecommerce page, branding on a more national level could be the best approach for you, but I’ll explain more about how to do that in SEO & SEM further down in this article.

If you are selling a service or a product in your local area, fashion keywords that will benefit your area of service, for Target Points Inc. great keyword optimizations would be “Long Island SEO Company,” “Garden City Digital Marketing Agency,” Social Media Marketing & Management Agency in Long Island & NYC.” These are just a few minor keywords we use.

Don’t forget to make the copy (text/content) in your webpages readable, relevant, and geared towards your audience. Although you are trying to please search engines by utilizing SEO tactics, your main goal is to increase conversions to your primary goal, such as sells, branding, etc. There’s no point to do SEO if your content is discouraging consumers from buying your service or products.

What to Focus on in SEO for a Startup?

Focus on creating good websites. The wireframe of the website needs to be friendly. This means to make sure that people can navigate your website easily, to potentially find the material and content they are looking for. Search engine bots will take this into consideration when indexing your website. If bots can find the relevant content and materials easily on your website, so can consumers (that’s the idea). Make sure your website isn’t heavy either, the speed of your website matters too.

Know the Science of backlinking (Link Building). Backlinking is important, because links that are linking to other pages gives link juice. You’ll want to make sure your websites are linked to websites that are already indexed high in google search engine results, or to any relevant websites that receive a lot of traffic and is taken into consideration by Google. Facebook does not affect your SEO, hence it will not be considered by Google if you link build there. Link building will affect your SEO, so look into how to do better SEO that way.

On-Page SEO matters a lot for your SEO tactic. Why I say this is because it’s true. When Google bots scurry the World Wide Web in search of relevant content being searched by users, make sure your websites URL’s for each page has relevant focused keywords in it. Make sure your relevant keyword in the

tag or h2’s / h3’s of the websites, alt text, and your content has relevant keywords and material in it. Make sure your content in your websites is enjoyable to read, and make sure you optimize it for SEO.

How to Use SEM for Your Startup Business?

Well, for starters, learn what SEM is. Paid ads on AdWords and such, will allow you to do more focused marketing at a price. This is the type of template social media websites use, in addition to your owned & earned content. But for AdWords (and it’s alike), PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns are effective for keyword usage, used on search engines. Knowing how to make a good landing page that relates to your ad-group and ads is really important to improve your quality score. Quality score is essential because it raises ranking of your Ad, and it lowers the cost of the click. With that said, you want to make sure your content is outstanding and relevant. Content in the ads you make, content in the landing page, content in the keywords you select must all be relevant to increase the quality score of the ads.

What to Do First?

Make sure you know what you want to advertise to your target market. Understand the relevant keywords people may be searching, that relate to your product. Such as “SEO Agency in Garden City,” or, “Long Island Digital Marketing Agency.” After searching relevant keywords, you’ll want to be keen to make the ads relevant to the keywords you’ve selected, and the landing page content per ad-group.

If this is your first time using AdWords, bid cautiously and make sure your ads and websites are connected to analytical tools, such as google analytics, to weigh on the results of your efforts. If things need to be improved, improve on them, etc.

How to Use SEO & SEM for Your Startup Business

Okay, now that you have the general idea of what SEO & SEM is. Here is the approach you’ll want to start taking for your startup business. Do all the backlinking, on-page SEO practices, and web development I had explained to you earlier. To rank high with your focused keywords, and its relevant keywords per webpage, etc. It’s going to take some time. But don’t let up, strive to be on the first page of search engine rankings with the SEO practices I have explained to you.

As you continue to invest time and money in your SEO campaigns, work on figuring out what ad campaigns you can utilize for PPC. PPC ads is one of the best ways to get your ads out there, on the internet, in a short period of time. So, let’s say you have to sell out the remainder of socks in your store, in less than 2 weeks. Use PPC to drive that message. Socks 45% off until (specific date). This will drive more traffic to your website, and hopefully increase sales. Or let’s say you have your thanksgiving sales promotion going on, you can make your SEM ad campaigns, months or weeks in advance (as well as to promote it months and weeks in advance) to encourage the specific event or promotion.

What This All Means

Invest time, money, and patience into building your SEO, but invest into ads simultaneously (with a nominable budget until proven otherwise) for PPC usage when you are doing promotions. If you know how to budget your campaigns and investments well, expect a return on your investments. But all great marketing strategies need, time, money, content, patience, and data (as well as good analytical skills for online marketing data assessments and strategy curating). These are keys to have in order to achieve a successful marketing strategy.

This is a great way to utilize SEO & SEM for your startup business.

Level Ten Solutions, Maqsood Rahman

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Maqsood is SEO specialist & working in digital marketing industry since 2006, currently living in New York City. He's addicted to technology and media trends and helps other companies with content strategies.