DIY — Laying the foundations for sustainable Organic growth in a Startup environment
Congratulations, you’ve successfully raised Round B and now you’re ready for all the great leads that have been sitting around waiting just for you. Only problem is, they have no idea you exist, and you have limited to no resources to get your message out there.
This is a common scenario I encountered with many early stage start-ups. They all face the same problems when trying to devise their tactical digital marketing plan. The bottom line is quite clear: an impressive digital presence is expensive.
In an ideal world, I’d stick to Peter Drucker’s solid advice :
“Do what you do best and outsource the rest”.
Working with a good digital marketing agency will probably maximize your ROI on marketing. The downside is that even though their optimization is expected to be faster, it will still require time and a padded pocket.
Frankly speaking, odds are that you are just as smart as your digital agency experts, and you probably know your products and personas better than they do. So learning and applying these fundamental tactics is something you should be able to execute independently.
This will assist in jump-starting your marketing efforts in the short term, but in any case shouldn’t be considered as a long term strategy.
1. Be lean
Creating a website isn’t something that requires raising a new round.
Go WordPress. It’s free, easy to learn, cheap to maintain and SEO friendly right out of the box.
Get a responsive and designed theme from a good marketplace (Try pojo.me or Avada, starting at 59$), have a Fiverr gig install it and you’re good to go.
The only place you shouldn’t be cheap is when choosing your hosting provider. Hosts that offer a dime-a-dozen will usually host your site alongside numerous others, causing your site to be slow and unstable, inevitably leading to a poor user experience and rankings. I’d recommend WP-Engine who offer scalable plans that should cover your all your needs.
Good data collection can also come free at this stage in your company’s life. Be sure to have Google Analytics implemented so you can track the incoming traffic. I’d also recommend installing the free versions of Heap analytics and Hotjar to provide a more granular picture of user behavior on the site itself.
2. Pick your battles #1
Truth is, you won’t rank for the keywords you want most. If somehow you do, they are most probably ones with zero actual search volume, suggesting they are too niche.
So what can I do? Invest in a good research. This will help you find the proper naming for your product and identify additional complementing terms you should use.
Not sure where to start? Look at what your competitors do, how they’ve named their products, both on the page itself (H1 tag) and on Google’s result page (Title tag). See if it makes sense to your potential clients.
Then test these phrases in Google’s free keyword planner tool to get a better understanding of what is actually being searched for (be aware that these are “exact match” searches).
The keyword planner can also be used to scan existing pages, for example the competitor’s product page or relevant Wikipedia item, and derive a list of relevant phrases too.
Once you have a few terms, you can also try exploring complementing terms using the Keyword Tool, which various keyword suggestions from Google search. Be sure to run these by the Keyword Planner too, to verify that they have actual search volume.
After you compile a decent list, try Googling these terms in Google and see what you get, so you don’t waste efforts on terms that Google interprets differently from your intuition. You’ll be amazed by the results.
A client of mine wanted to promote their site for WFM (Workforce management) but we found the term was associated by Google to Whole Foods Market instead.
Your end goal should be several keyword groups, each consisting of an anchor keyword (e.g. Logo design) and several peripheral keywords (e.g. Logo design services, logo design company).
These should be incorporated into the relevant page’s title and header (H1).
If you have a single product (you’re a Startup right?), be sure to use the strongest keyword group on the homepage.
3. Pick your battles #2
We’ve all hailed Content as king and watched as numerous coups have failed to dethrone it.
You should indeed create content but be aware that you’re most probably not unique or valuable in any way. So posting feverishly on your company blog is most likely a waste of good time.
What should I do? In short, less is more. Talk about yourself only in specific posts. Think about the content you would share on LinkedIn/Twitter. Definitely not one of a brand praising itself.
Not sure what to write about? Take your competitor’s content and run it through a tool to see how it performs on social media (sharedcount.com).
I also recommend using Hubspot’s topic generator for additional ideas regarding your products, by simply plugging in the keyword groups you’ve found.
Remember content is just a step in the funnel. Even once you’ve got people to read your posts, it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll convert into leads.
This usually requires creating an additional related and interesting piece. It doesn’t necessarily need to be SEO-oriented, but should attract people enough for them to leave their contact information in order to get it (aka Gated content). The default topics I’d consider would usually be Gartner/Forrester reports on your market (as long as you’re well positioned), industry benchmarks or an interesting research you’ve done within your field.
That’s a handful!
Well, yes. But if you invest the right amount of time in researching and planning out your organic content, the execution itself will be short. When done right, this content should also be one that performs well on social and paid media.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln
Final thoughts
This approach should cover the two main elements of good SEO — On-site Content & Technical SEO. Any pro SEO would now probably jump in his seat yelling “but what about X!?”, and is most probably right. Additional SEO work is indeed needed, but under the resource constraints mentioned above, this will kick-start your Organic performance in the right direction.
Remember, this is just an initial plan for a single channel, before taking into account any additional and more complex tools you must have in your marketeer toolbox (e.g. retargeting, paid search, LinkedIn ads etc.).
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and hacks too
