Marketing in today’s economy is tough for many startups and new tech companies. They simply don’t have the resources including ad budgets, the staff or the time that many bigger businesses have. Luckily, these things don’t make a difference to search engines. Search engine optimization is one way for smaller businesses to compete with larger competition.
The first step is to add content. The more useful content there is on a website, the more chances consumers have to discover the products and services offered by small companies. Another thing to remember is search engines love unique content.
These are some extra content tips for a new business website.
- Interviews, conversations, product DVDs, personal opinions and reviews are all content. Record everything and transcribe it all into text.
- Turn support e-mails into FAQ pages on your site.
- Turn PDF’s into HTML pages.
- Create videos of everything.
Startups and new tech companies have a personal voice. Making sure that voice is adequately heard can help build customer trust and eventually help a new business owner successfully market their knowledge of the product they are selling. Consumers use search engines to find recommendations of services and products. So a good idea for a small business owner is to make sure their customers can easily find those recommendations. A business owner can publish recommendations from their customers or create a buyer’s guide with lists or ratings of their own recommendations. Consumers use search engines to research information about local companies. Many startups should also take advantage of local search options.
One problem small businesses may encounter is slow website speed. While it may be one of the last things that owners of new tech companies consider, Google has introduced speed into the ranking algorithm, so it’s a good time to check out how fast a site loads. When a site’s speed is improved, it also improves a customer’s experience and this may make them more likely to revisit a site. Tools like Web Page Analyzer and the Firefox extension YSlow! can help a business owner learn why pages are taking longer to load so they can take steps to fix the problem.
Other things that can help drive traffic on a website are internal links. Sites like Copyblogger can be used to reference older posts in newer articles. This helps customers do their own research and adds to a startups’ SEO success. Remember that happy customers will often times link to your site so it’s a good idea to write content and provide links for people, and not specifically for search engines. The overarching goal is still to get more people to visit the company site.
The owner of a new business shouldn’t stress too much about a nofollow link. If they’re smart, they’ll worry about creating great content. Content can be controlled by a business owner. When a website includes strong content for customers then many aspects of SEO will also fall into place. What makes a site better usually attracts customers and is often good for SEO too.