Ranking for Growth: SEO Strategy to Organically Fuel Your Company

Optimizing your website and content for search engines can organically earn placement and visibility for your SEO Strategy. As an early-stage company, investing in paid search ads can be cost-prohibitive. But that doesn’t mean you can’t tap into search engines to grow awareness and traffic.

With some SEO Strategy, savvy and elbow grease, you can capture qualified visitors without breaking the bank. For resource-constrained Series A companies, focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) over paid search makes sense.

Here are key steps to improve organic rankings and results:

Start with Killer Content

At its core, SEO is about creating content optimized to rank for specific keyword searches. However, the days of being able to game the system by keyword stuffing – jamming important phrases into your website, even when it doesn’t make sense – are long gone. Now, the best way to generate results is to start by publishing blog posts, guides, tools, and other assets that are truly useful to your audience while incorporating relevant terms.

For example, a Series A fintech startup could post a blog on “8 Ways Financial Institutions Can Improve Their Mobile App User Experience.” Include this primary keyword along with related terms like “finance app UX” and “mobile banking design.”

Keep titles, headers, copy, and metadata focused on target keywords. This signals search engines what each piece of content covers, helping drive higher rankings for those searches.

Conduct Keyword Research

Stuffing season may be over, but good keyword research still allows you to align content with the highest-value search terms people actually use. SaaS tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner can surface popular keywords to target.

Look for search phrases with high monthly volumes and low competition – the optimization “sweet spot.” This helps ensure your content can realistically rank against established sites. Nursing home management software? Ferret sweater manufacturers? Get creative looking for traffic treasure!

SEO Strategy: Optimize Website Copy

While blog content is critical, it’s also important to weave keywords into other site copy, from your page titles and headers through to image filenames and alt text. This small change improves the chance of search engines associating your entire site with relevant keywords, not just your blog.

Polish Those Meta Tags

Meta tags provide critical context to search engine crawlers. Carefully craft descriptive <title> tags, page descriptions, and meta keywords on every page on your site. Keep them short, snappy and packed with your keywords.

For example:

Title: “Mobile Banking App Design Tips | Acme Fintech”

Description: “Learn 8 proven design strategies to improve mobile banking user experience and customer retention.”

Handle the Technical SEO

Search engine providers don’t just want to ensure their users find relevant information; they also want to provide a positive experience. As well as content, they factor in elements including website speed, security, accessibility and more – a range of factors known as ‘technical SEO.’

You can tighten up technical SEO by:

• Compressing images and media
• Eliminating broken links
• Improving page load times
• Optimizing site architecture
• Adding alt text for images
• Enabling HTTPS encryption

While these changes may seem minor, every improvement makes your site more crawlable and rankable.

Promote Content Off-Site

Don’t just publish content and pray search engines find it. Actively promote your content outside your own channels by:

• Pitching guest posts to industry blogs
• Getting backlinks from related resources
• Sharing across social media
• Syndicating through publisher networks

The more reputable sites link back to your content, the more authority search engines give to your brand.

Monitor your SEO Strategy and Refine Over Time

SEO isn’t a one-and-done operation but an ongoing process that needs constant tweaking and refinement. Use free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor how your pages rank for chosen keywords and the traffic referred from organic search.

Identify both successes to double down on and areas needing improvement. Refine your keyword targeting, on-page optimization, and promotion strategies over time. With consistency, your organic search visibility and conversions will steadily grow.

Ultimately, SEO remains one of the most valuable channels for fledgling startups to drive awareness and traffic, accounting for about 53% of all website traffic. By playing the long game and continually optimizing based on data, Series A companies can fuel real growth through strategic search engine visibility – no massive ad budget required.