10 SEO Tips for Startups

OC4 Member, entrepreneur and digital media consultant, Todd Herschberg shares his ten SEO tips for startups.

SEO has changed significantly over the last decade, which is a wonderful thing – it keeps the field fresh! Here are 10 things startups should keep in mind:

User Experience is now far more important than links (not that links are unimportant, but UX has a far higher weighting in the algorithm.

Make sure that your pages load quickly. Google (via Lighthouse) provides a great free tool that analyzes page speed and provides improvement recommendations. Note that it only looks at individual pages at a particular moment in time: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Google search results are strongly favoring the mobile versions of sites. Any site development should be thought of "mobile first" to maximize your user experience and rankings.

Gone are the days when a Google search result page was "10 blue links". If you want to maximize your visibility on Google, you should have a mix of various media on your pages... all of which are optimized.

Google frequently uses a page's meta description tag as the non-linking text for a search result. Make sure you take advantage of this by providing a strong CTA (Call-to-Action) in each page's meta description tag.

One of the biggest missed opportunities is images. in 2018, 22.6% of ALL internet searches were Google Image searches. Make sure you have unique, high-quality images on your site. Make sure you are using the image alt text to provide a good, search-friendly description for each image.

Another frequently missed opportunity is video. YouTube is the second most popular search engine on Earth (after Google & before Facebook).

If you have a physical, local presence, make sure you are optimizing for local search as well. Google Maps accounts for more than 10% of all internet searches.

An ever-increasing percentage of search is done via voice search ("OK, Google", "Hey, Alexa", Siri, Cortana, etc). Make sure you are using structured data to take advantage of this.

Remember that Google has an entire team of webspam specialists devoted to ferreting out and penalizing folks attempting to use "black hat" techniques to game the system. Always follow best practices and you shouldn't run into many issues.

About Todd

Todd is a seasoned entrepreneur and growth marketing executive with a heavy emphasis on branding, ecommerce and digital marketing including SEO, SEM and social media. Previously the head of digital marketing programs for companies ranging from early-stage startups to global companies such as TRX and Alibaba, Todd now runs digital marketing consultancy Quantimark and is currently working on launching a new startup.