SEO for Startups: How to Establish Your Brand in Search

If you are a small company that is just starting out, you probably can not afford to spend time worrying about search engine optimization or ranking for competitive keywords.

Why is this?  Because you need to focus on getting your startup off the ground.  You need to focus on getting business and money coming in.  
SEO can take time, You can take help of MangoMatter for digital marketing services.

SEO for your startup.  

What you should do are two things.  You should take care of the on-page factors on your website to optimize for search.  Then you should build your brand online.

What does build your brand online mean?  Well, it basically means you want to rank for your brand name.  Not only do you want to rank for your brand name, you want to completely cover the entire search engine results page for your brand.

Why is this important?  Because this is what real brands do.  Pick a big name brand.  Let’s pick McDonalds.  Now Google “McDonalds”.  This is what you see:

Do you notice how all the organic listings, and even the PPC ad on the results page are McDonalds properties?  You will see their website, their Wikipedia page, the McDonalds app, their Facebook page, etc.  Every thing you see on this page goes back to McDonalds.  

And this makes sense right?  McDonalds is a big well known brand.  But, this does not only work with McDonalds, this works with all the big brands.  Pick any brand like Ford, Toyota, or Disney.  They all cover the search engine results page for their brand.  

This is what startups need to do.  They need to think and act, like real big name brands.  

Why does this matter?  Well, a brand search is one of the most common searches that are entered in to Google.  And Google loves brands, because brands have established trust with consumers.

So if someone mentions your startup’s product or service to a friend or family member, one of the first things that a searcher will do is pull out their phone and do a brand search.  They will search for your company’s name.

It is important that you show up for your brand name.  What would you think if someone searches for your company and you don’t show up?  What would you think if someone searches for your brand name and you show up halfway down the first page, or in the second or third organic listing?
Is that how it looks when someone searches for a real, established brand? 

No, of course not.  

When someone searches for your brand you need to cover the organic results.  You need to take up the whole page.

How do you do this?  Well, start Googling real brands.  
You see things like a business Facebook page.  You will see things like a business YouTube channel, and a Google My Business listing (if you are a local business you have to have a Google business listing).  In the case of McDonalds, you also find a Wikipedia page.  You will not be able to go a create your own Wikipedia page, but do not worry about that.  Focus on what you can create.

You can create a business Twitter page, a branded LinkedIn page, there are a whole ton of different social media accounts that you can create that are branded in your startup’s business name.  Many of these accounts will get picked up by Google.  This is called “indexed”.  Not all of these accounts will but many will, especially the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
So copy what big brands do.  You won’t be able to do everything they do, but you will be able to create all the branded social accounts.  If you are a local business, you can also take advantage of business listings.  These are also called citations.  Citations are things like Yelp, BBB, etc.  You can create a branded Yelp, these are almost always indexed in Google.

The more of the accounts you can create for your startup the better.  Keep doing this until you have filled the first page of search with all accounts that are branded in your name and lead right back to your website.
This is the beginning of getting SEO services to bring more visibility and customers to your business.