There are approx. 150 million startups in the world today, and every year new 50 million startups launch themselves.

But how many startups can compete to survive the ongoing changing environment? The entire dynamics of today’s startups’ world has been transformed.

The problems these days are different than the previous ones like Poor Data Security, Lack of Strategic Planning, Lack of Adequate Funding, etc.

In this fast-paced era, Building an online presence is tough, frustrating, and time-consuming for startups along with the other challenges too. But at the same time, it’s also very important.

Because it allows people to find you, get engaged with your brand, get to know you more, and trust you.

Why online presence is crucial for startups?

• It makes easier for potential customers to come to you.
• It is an effective and best platform to showcase your products and services.
• Building relationships with customers and other businesses become easy.
• It allows having the support of excellent marketing tools.

If your startup doesn’t have an online presence then,

• No 24/7 customer service support
• No live/ work from anywhere benefit
• Expensive operation costs
• No better chances of prospective leads and future business endeavors

So, got convinced that an online presence for your startup is the need of the hour.

But the questions remain the same? How is it possible? From where to start?

Let’s begin.

What to consider while making an online presence?

It is your job to make your users feel good about your brand by focusing on the following:

• Your content should be of high quality and relevant.
• Your website should be attractive-looking and have user-friendly navigation.
• The website’s content should be findable easily and accessible to everyone.

Key Components to make a successful online presence

Every brand has a great story to tell, which can become a powerful source for internet marketing and creating brand’s awareness effectively and strategically.

And for this purpose, only high-quality content is not enough. You have to come up with a customer-centric approach and tell how your product or services support to meet the consumer’s goals. And in between this, you fit keyword phrases naturally into the context to support your story that it almost looks effortless.

But is it enough? No!

You have to use the three following key components wisely and strategically:

• Content
• Copywriting
• SEO

Whether you run an online business or just want to derive traffic towards your website, these three components get you traffic, prospective leads, and sales. It is called the inbound methodology, which helps in making your brand discoverable. It optimizes your content for the right keywords to boost your brand image and to become more visible to search engines.

These three aspects work in synergy as a backbone for your brand. Not only this, but the overall design and UI/ UX should also be close enough to SEO.

But the question remains the same, how to start with? Is it possible to do without any experience?

Let’s begin, and we will talk about one of the key components i.e., SEO.

How SEO impacts your online presence?

Before Beginning strategize your goals

Before anything else, you should understand and acknowledge what you’re short-term and long-term business goals are. Devise strategies to accomplish them.

As soon as you start working on your online presence, it would get essential to track your progress. So, how would you track without setting goals?

• Write down your goals. Make them realistic and formulated.
• It’s up to you whether you want to track your progress weekly or monthly. Monitoring both ways is exceptional.

Content & SEO

Tip #1 – Use keyword phrases

Keywords play an important role for both the customers and search engines. The content and relevant keywords both should have a connection.

For this reason, content marketers prefer long-tail keywords. According to research, Amazon generates around 57% of its income through long-tail keywords.

They are less competitive and generate a better lead for your business.

Tip #2 – Work on a compelling headline

Do you know 80% of the people just read the headline of the content and then decide to read more or not? It entices people to go for more or make them turn off.

But writing good headlines is very hard. You have to pull out all your creative juices.

In this smart era, you have some benefit not to start from scratch.  There are some fantastic tools for this purpose, like Hubspot Blog Topic Generator, Impact Blog Title Generator, Portent Content Idea Generator, etc.

You just have to input your keyword in these tools, and they suggest you with worthy titles.

Tip #3 – Optimize tags

Placing the right keyword phrases in tags is the most important. It boosts a solid foundation of on-page search engine optimization for each piece of content you post.

You must have to use your target keywords in the following three tags:

• Title
• Meta-description
• URL

Tip #4 – Inserting High-quality backlinks

Backlinking is a process when one website mentions another website by linking to it.  It helps in increasing the website’s rank in the search engine result.

What does it do?

• It enhances the overall Brand Recognition and exposure. Search engines automatically identify the links on your website and find that it has some useful information for the consumers.
• Having some backlinks can get you towards new professional relationships, consumers, and prospective leads. After reading a good blog post, there is an excellent chance to click on the link to learn more about it. It will bring consumers to your brand without the involvement of searching.
• Backlinks are one of the direct ways to promote your brands or products by commenting on credible sites or social media.
• It is a valuable source to generate Referral traffic. It means that people are clicking on the links within your content and are taken to the linked content.

Design and SEO

The brand image is directly linked to the visuals. When companies go under the re-branding process, they usually have to work a lot during the design process.

It’s to endorse a more profound sense of belonging. Like a well-designed logo promotes the right message to your target audience. Your visualization planning depends on your business and personal goals.

But how to do this?

Make your design user-friendly by:

• Offering value first. Users shouldn’t find it harder to look for the relevant information on your website. The overall design and images should speak for themselves.
• Don’t stuff your images with the forced keywords. It almost hurts the overall SEO process because the search engine doesn’t read images, and ultimately your content loses value.

For example, if there’s a website for an online leather jacket store, you need to describe the products below every image.

• Don’t forget to consider the sitemap. Sitemaps help search engines to understand the structure of your site. It also helps the users to find the essential pages on your website so they can prioritize.

Social Media and SEO

How fantastic it is to have a social media profile for your brands having a massive following, and everyone wants to know about your product and content updates. I am not dreaming, it’s possible.

Social media is a significant traffic resource.  When you optimize your social media profiles and posts religiously, you become searchable and more visible.

According to a study, 76% of marketers admitted to using Social Media for better SEO.

Some easy ways to integrate social media into your branding solutions are:

• Choose the right social media platform according to your business goals and needs.
• Create meaningful social profiles that describe yourself and your brand professionally.
• Optimize all your social posts for higher visibility and clickability.

Conclusion

Having a brand doesn’t mean just that people identify you because of your logo or tagline. It’s a lot more than this. People should discover and connect with your brand.

Implementing the relevant methodologies to the search engines is the key to get discovered and speaking directly to your target audience. And SEO is your magic tool to help you with both of these.

It doesn’t matter whether your business is online and offline, using SEO should be one of the priorities. It would do nothing but adds value the most.

Author Bio:
About Michelle Joe: Michelle Joe is a blogger by choice. She loves to discover the world around her. She likes to share her discoveries, experiences, and express herself through her blogs. You can find her on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook