Chief Strategist at Shine Content Strategy, Shannon Murphy "has brought a love of clear, concise communication to content marketing for the last 12 years." Her workshop during Startup Boston’s recent Marketing on a Budget Bootcamp, Crafting the Best SEO Strategy for your Startup, aims at helping entrepreneurs, startup marketers, and small business owners gain valuable insights into how to build and implement an optimized SEO strategy as the foundation of their marketing efforts.
During the workshop Shannon covered four main topics:
How to audit your current SEO strategy
Which keywords to focus on
Where to work these keywords into your content
Why certain keywords are working for you, and how to double-down on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) wins.
Establish a proper foundation with your website
Optimizing your website will help generate a greater impact when you decide to go live. This includes on-page and off-page optimization, consisting of individual items that need to be optimized in order to gain page-one prominence on Google.
On-page SEO includes: site performance, URL structure, anchor text, HTML tags, keyword density, content, internal linking, and other less transparent metrics, et cetera.
Off-page SEO includes: link building, social signals, brand mentions, directory submissions, image/video sharing etc. It is also important to note that certain SEO metrics are unmeasurable due to Google's private algorithms. Therefore, auditing specific metrics in your startups' current SEO strategy can be done through a number of great tools.
Write for customer intent
Conducting proper keyword research is essential for optimization and content creation. Keywords should be placed in different types of content to help write for customer intent. There are different tools and tactics which can be used to identify which keywords to use. A great tactic Shannon mentioned is using the tool Answer the Public, which listens to autocomplete data from search engines to help gather and break down your keyword research into queries (who, what, where, how), prepositions (with, out, near, to, against) and comparisons (versus/VS, like, and, or). Breaking down the keyword research into these different categories helps you easily determine which keywords to start using in your content strategy. Here are some more tools to optimize your keyword research.
Marketing Maven (to analyze your content)
When adding these keywords within your content, it’s important to focus on where you are using those keywords throughout the page. According to Shannon, “Optimized content has essential keywords mentioned in the title, throughout headers, throughout content with both internal/ external links and are linked to images.” You can't just pepper it into your lede!
Authority links
Once your content is created, you will need to link to authority once you've conducted research to create SEO-powered content. Linking to authority is done by including internal/external links throughout your content that guides site visitors to another source (a topically relevant and trustworthy site—look for your industry thought leaders and dominant brands). By analyzing your content on a regular basis, you can find the optimal places where you will be able to link your content (this could be linking the content to your own site or to another site).
Tools included:
Shannon shared one last piece of advice on crafting the best SEO strategy which was: “get your performance report on Google Search Console.” This report shows your site’s overall search performance on Google and helps you re-optimize your pages based on the keyword terms you have been using.
We hope you enjoyed this event as much as we did! These key insights will surely help craft the best SEO strategy for your startup. If you’re a marketer, Startup Boston Week’s 2020 Sales and Marketing track has perfect programming for you this year—all virtual, all Boston. Get your ticket here for events like:
See you there!