4 Tips for Creating an Effective SEO Strategy as a Beginner Entrepreneur

Intro

Being an entrepreneur in today’s world is a lot more complicated than it used to be. 50 years ago, you could get by with a great idea and a keen eye for business, today, you’ll need a wide variety of technical skills on top of that.

As a beginner entrepreneur, you’re likely trying to keep costs low while you work to get your venture off the ground. But for that to happen in a search engine-powered world, you’ll need to understand how search engines work and how you can create content that will appeal to them. (After all, 40% of all consumers use search engines to find products.)

People need to be able to find you if you want to have any hope of scaling your operations. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. SEO is a series of site optimization, content tweaks, and link generation efforts that you perform on and off your pages. It’s how you make Google notice you.

Most large businesses with strong marketing budgets hire SEO firms to take care of this difficult process. But as a beginner entrepreneur, you might need to get the ball rolling on your own before bringing in more specialized help down the line.

That’s why we’re sharing four important beginner tips to build a better SEO strategy that moves your businesses up the search engine ladder.

4 SEO tips for Beginner Entrepreneurs

Perform Keyword Research

The first thing you’ll need to do as an entrepreneur embarking on an SEO journey is thorough keyword research.

(Image Source)

You need to find keywords relevant to your audience that also have a high search volume. After all, it’s not going to do you any good to rank for a term that no one is searching for. But you need to choose your keywords carefully. If there’s a ton of competition and you’re competing with Fortune 500 companies and Wiki pages, you’ll have difficulty getting noticed.

Instead, try to look for low-hanging fruit with relevancy, volume, and lower levels of competition.

For example, if you’re a travel agency, you’re not going to rank on the first page for “Universal Studios Vacation” right off the bat. There’s just too much competition for the term, and Universal itself will dominate the SERP.

However, if you went after something more niche, like “Universal Studios transportation” or “Universal Studios tips,” you might see more success.

You can use an SEO tool like Rank Tracker’s Keyword Finder to find viable long-tail keywords like that. There’s also a free Google Keyword Planner available to anyone with a Google account.

It’s also a good idea to check out the SERP yourself. You can find additional terms and ideas by looking at Google’s autocomplete options in the search bar or going through the “People Also Ask” section.

Ensure Fast Load Times

If your site isn’t fast, most visitors won’t even see your homepage. The average user doesn’t want to sit around and wait for pages to load. You have a window of about four seconds before a user gets frustrated and navigates away.

(Image Source)

And it’s not just users who are obsessed with speed. Google also takes this into account when assigning rankings.

Why does Google care about website speed?

Google wants to make sure that the sites it recommends will serve the needs of users. If users want speed, then so does Google. If you’re not providing a positive user experience, then Google will move you to the back of the line and recommend competitor sites that load instantly.

To ensure your website loads fast, make sure that you’re optimizing images by compressing files, minifying your CSS and JavaScript files, reducing your HTTP requests, minimizing your internal scripts, and avoiding redirects when possible.

Generate Links

Link building is one of the most vital pieces of the SEO puzzle, but it’s also one of the most difficult.

Internal linking is the easy part. Just look at your content and find opportunities to link various pages together. This not only helps Google index your pages, but it also helps keep users engaged on your site for longer.

(Image Source)

External linking is where things get tricky. If you want to rank, Google expects you to have a number of high-quality backlinks from trusted external websites relevant to your industry.

You can accomplish this through guest posting. Do your research and identify sites with prime linking opportunities. Then, embark on an outreach campaign to pitch articles to those sites that you’ll write at no cost.

These articles should contain a link back to your page. To track the backlinks you are acquiring, you can use Ranktracker’s backlink monitor tool to see who’s linking to your site

It’s important to make sure that you reach out to quality sites and the right contacts if you want to be an effective guest poster. We recommend using an email finder tool to gather contact information and make outreach easier.

Optimize the Back-End

A common misconception among SEO beginners is that all optimization occurs on the front end of your website.

There’s a lot of back-end optimization that has to happen if you want to get noticed by Google and rise up the SERP listings.

First off, optimize your meta title and meta description with keywords. You’ll also need to optimize your images, including title tags and alt descriptions. Your URL is another great opportunity to sprinkle in the target search term.

Conclusion

As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be an SEO expert. But you need to be familiar with the basics of SEO, even if you plan on hiring third-party help to get the job done.

Performing keyword research, ensuring that your site loads in under four seconds, generating links, and optimizing the back-end of your pages will put you on the right path. However, you should eventually look into bringing on an SEO professional with years of experience. They can perform regular site and content audits and adjust your strategy accordingly as Google’s algorithm evolves.