As a start up, the biggest pressure you face is time. Time to gain traffic before you run out of money, time to beat your competitors to market, time to find the time to fix the million and one bugs on your site, whilst also deciding on new features, cutting out the parts that don’t work, and even at times remembering to eat, sleep and wash. Well, two out of three aint bad.
Anyway, at some point, you’ll come to a realisation that you need users. Actually, seeing some of the prices paid in Silicon Valley, sometimes you just need a hot tub and beer cooler, but assuming you’re not in with the money crowd, you’re going to need to get some people to come to your website, download your app or play your game.
By that stage, however, it might be too late. If you start to try to build your web visibility at the moment you actually need traffic, you’re going to be too late – you’ll get traffic, but not when you actually need it. Lucky for you, then, that you’re here now, and you can build in a search visibility plan for your site from the very start. Brilliant!
There is a tendency to think that the best route to traffic is to create a big splash in tech blogs, start up sites, with a big PR campaign or a flashy launch. This, however, is a case of confirmation bias – because this is the most obvious part of a campaign, there’s an assumption that this is the key to success. It’s not – it’s just a part.
A mixed search marketing campaign is the best strategy for start-ups. First, though, I want to talk about the consensus in the SEO industry about site age. The story goes, Google loves and old domain, an old site. Look at the ones that have been around for ages, they are the best in the search rankings.
Again, confirmation bias.
It’s really not a question of the age of a domain benefitting a site, but rather the case that the longer a site has been around, the more links it will have had directed to it. Broadly speaking, more links, better rankings.
And so, this has never really been challenged, because, well, getting a site up early is still the most important thing you can do. Get some content on there, establish some relevancy, make sure all your on page optimisation is in order (there are a million and one blogs that will tell you the top five best things to do to your website, so I’m not even going to bother chasing that rabbit), and start to build some links.
Which ties into your PR strategy – creating links and driving traffic. And you can augment it with paid search traffic, too. The point is, none of this is impossible unless you think about, and plan your approach to getting traffic onto your website six to nine months before you think you’ll actually need it. Search marketing should be at the core of your business plan, under the section ‘customer acquisition’, and not just an afterthought.
Damain Koblintz is part of the search engine optimisation team at Vertical Leap, a search engine marketing company based in Portsmouth, Hampshire.
