How Little SEO Can Your Business Get Away With?

Don’t Forget About SEO in Your Startup

One of the most significant mistakes that a startup website could make is to totally ignore SEO from the beginning. It is certainly a substantial task to try, especially when you’re new to online marketing, but we feel it’s an effort worth making, even at a minimal level. The primary reason why is that you’re giving Google an incorrect message right away. They will attempt to index your pages, and if your pages are lacking any SEO, often times they are either unable to index, index the page incorrectly, or because on-page SEO is such a big part of the search algorithm, rank them so far down the search results as to be invisible. That’s a shame, as there are some very easy methods for getting started with SEO that don’t require a full-blown SEO firm to get accomplished.

Heard about Minimum Viable SEO?

Priceonomics.com coined the term, “minimum viable SEO“, which means basically what it says: exactly what can you get by with in terms of SEO to start. Even though this is by no means an ideal strategy, it’s better than not doing anything. Below are some of the things they pointed out, along with some of our own ideas tossed in.

Decide on a keyword strategy – This will help you see not only what your site structure should look like, but also how quickly you’ll be into profit. One option is to go after the long tail of search, meaning keywords that are commonly 3-5 words long, often with product or model numbers. They don’t get a ton of searches each day, but are infinitely easier to rank for. Add a few thousand of these up, and you win. Another way to go is to go after a single keyword, like “auto insurance San Diego” you’ll typically be trying to rank only your home page. If you have a business with a local presence, always have local geo-modifiers on your keywords, as in the aforementioned example.

Use breadcrumb navigation – You’ve seen this on many web pages. It is a set of links that show where you’ve been on the site, and where you are now. This is helpful for the searcher, (which Google likes) and covers a good deal of internal linkage. Here is what it typically looks like: Home > Tablets > Apple > Ipad 2 3g

Use accurate title tags – Making certain the title tag on your page is accurate; which means that it is the keyword you want that page to be ranked for, is perhaps the most important SEO task to do. Using local geo-modifiers is critical here too.

Doing minimum viable SEO is a start, and much better than doing nothing. Just don’t allow it to be the end!