Why Outsource Keyword Research Services at your Startup?
Did you know that 50% of venture capital raised for startups goes into paid advertising rather than generating organic traffic? Pouring budgets into Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads provides immediate and more predictable results, where you pay X amount of money for Y amount of traffic. Startups can build brand awareness straight away, whereas search engine optimization (SEO) can take months to gain traction.
However, what happens three months down the line when the advertising budget becomes more limited? Without an investment in SEO keyword research services and a proper balance between SEO vs PPC, startups can suddenly find that their initial online presence is beginning to dwindle, and there is no organic effort to back it up Research shows that 70% to 80% of users ignore paid advertisements over organic results. If you have no organic presence, your B2B startup marketing strategy could be doomed before it has even truly begun.
Startups have limited resources and time but must incorporate SEO if they want an effective marketing strategy. Many are looking to outsource keyword research to ensure long-term success.
Why is Keyword Research Important for SEO?
A thorough keyword research service, such as included in Stark Visibility’s SEO copywriting services, help startups discover and implement SEO keywords that will drive visibility, traffic and leads. Brands can leverage critical information about competitive and converting keywords to target and generate an SEO strategy that scales business growth to the next level.
The importance of keyword research in SEO is substantial. Simply having a website and creating content is not enough for long-term success; you must have a site built as an asset that continues delivering value.
Search engines such as Google and Bing crawl different areas of your website to understand the content and return relevant responses to user queries. You can see some of the key aspects of a page that search crawlers account for when determining organic ranking in the image below.
Image from Backlinko
The more relevant your site is to user searches and intent, the higher you rank in search engine results. Without an intuitive SEO keyword research service, it’s almost impossible to know the best way to achieve that.
Keyword research services help you discover the types of content your target audience searches for to ensure your website is relevant to their intent. Strategic keyword placement improves your chances of continuing to rank organically for sustainable traffic once there isn’t any startup budget left for paid ads.
Image from Mangools
B2B companies often outsource keyword research to agencies like Stark Visibility who are experienced in working with startups and can quickly help you to find your “good keywords” and build SEO into your short-term strategy. Startups that outsource keyword research services benefit from expert knowledge of:
- Understanding how to use seed, supporting, semantic and long-tailed keywords
- Organic SEO keyword research for your information architecture
- Linking keyword research to your marketing funnel
- Extensive competitive research for competitor conquesting
- Product keyword research services for ideal positioning
- How to scale your SEO content marketing
We will cover some of the points above in this article.
Why you need an Information Architecture for SEO
When creating a new website, it’s easy to get distracted by aesthetics and functionality and neglect SEO considerations like keyword research and implementation. One of your first steps in creating an SEO-friendly website should be to conduct a thorough search for relevant keywords.
SEO Information Architecture (IA) covers several aspects of a website’s structure, including the hierarchy of pages, conversion points, depth of content, and internal linking – but most importantly in the case of SEO, the researched keyword profiles of each page. Creating an information architecture diagram is a process known as keyword mapping.
Identifying the seed keyword and top supporting keywords of each core page is the first step of a holistic B2B SEO service. For example at Stark Visibility, after researching the competitive landscape, product positioning, industry nuances and initial discussions with our clients, we will set out to create an information architecture SEO diagram.
Creating an IA is a complex but critical process to not only be on the same page internally and externally about the SEO strategy, but to create a data-driven roadmap that embeds SEO top-down from the domain, page and keyword perspectives of your site. Information architecture SEO also helps avoid mistakes such as keyword cannibalization and keyword stuffing.
Image from tuts+
It’s common for teams to skip the keyword research step when planning a new website’s structure and content, missing out on valuable information about what their customers are searching for and how to position each page to nurture them along their customer journey.
Keyword research is an essential component in ensuring that search engines understand the purpose of your website as well as each individual page, so that they can match search queries to the relevant content on your domain. In addition, keyword research can assist you in creating a buyer’s journey map (we’ll talk about this later) and determining what information visitors require at each stage of the buying process to increase your conversion rate.
It is definitely a good idea to implement your keywords after the site launches if you overlooked SEO keyword research initially, but you may end up identifying a more effective positioning strategy that would undo some of the development work that was already done. A high-quality keyword research service for small businesses will understand that things move fast and will know how to marry the art of your existing marketing message with the science of SEO.
Keyword research services will help plot your target words into your information architecture for effective on-page SEO and new content creation (see our SEO copywriting checklist to learn this process), enabling startups to focus on the aesthetics and other parts of the marketing strategy.
Customer Intent and the Marketing Funnel
As buyers move through your marketing funnel, your content needs to match their search intent.
Image from SingleGrain
Imagine a SaaS startup considering the marketing funnel. If you are launching a new product or service, you should not only optimize your product page(s) around the high intent keywords like “machine learning platform”. Instead, you need to create content assets that can provide educational value to your SaaS buyers.
During the Awareness stage, the objective is not necessarily to sell them anything but to provide enough information at the top of the funnel to keep them interested. For example, you might write a blog post optimized around the keyword “challenges of machine learning in finance” to try to engage and create demand with your target audience. B2B sales cycles can be very long – it’s best to focus on attracting and nurturing users to conversion, rather than only applying SEO to bottom-of-funnel content.
In the context of search queries, top-of-the-funnel customers typically start by writing “How to” or “How can I” or “Reasons for” and other questioning type inputs. Your website content should reflect the pain points customers are likely to search for (their intent), followed up with the benefits of using your products.
As buyers move through the funnel, searches become more specific as they find solutions that fix their specific problems.
The best keyword research services understand keywords to map to user intent and the best way to feed that into your website content.
Easy On-Page SEO Tactics
When you outsource keyword research services, you will get suggestions on the key places where it makes sense to use keywords on your website pages. It’s crucial to know modern on-page optimization techniques to put those keywords to best use. Though we’ve broadly mentioned a few here, please download the SEO Copywriting 101 eBook to read the full list of 20 tips for practical SEO copywriting.
Page titles
The page title is the main subject of your webpage and shows up as the first line in SERPs. Seed SEO keywords or phrases should form that title as best practice to show it is relevant.
Image from Alexa blog
Meta descriptions
The meta description shows in search engine results below the page title. Although it may not be a ranking factor, the meta description enables Google to match your page to user intent. It’s essential to use supporting keywords here that users will be searching for.
Headings (h1, h2, h3, h4+)
The strategic use of keywords is vital for maximizing SEO. Keyword research helps to understand the best words to drive users to each page, but it takes an experienced marketer to implement them optimally. According to Moz, long-tailed keywords are most effective for increasing SEO performance in headers. Search engine crawlers will use h1 tags to understand what your page is about quickly.
Image from ahrefs
Content
Your content is one of the best places to use SEO keywords to your advantage. and is one of the most critical SEO ranking factors.
However, the most important thing is to get it right; poor keyword usage can actually harm your search engine rankings.
Avoiding keyword stuffing, for example, is critical. If your content is littered with keywords, it’s likely to be penalized by Google.
Image from ClickZ
SEO keyword research services will help you structure your words appropriately within your website content.
Images
Images are indexed by search engine crawlers as well. They should be relevant to your content, including titles and alt text that are descriptive and utilize your supporting keywords.
URLs
URLs can also include keywords to give users a hint about what is on the page. They should be descriptive, which entails putting your SEO keywords in the URL.
There are several other keyword insertion tactics that keyword research service specialists can incorporate on your website to accelerate your SEO, including link anchors, directory links, and social media.
The Importance of Tracking Keyword Performance
Although specific keywords might work today, that doesn’t mean they will work forever. New startups come in with their strategies, increase the competition, and form different niches. SEO keyword research should be a continuous process.
Tools such as SEMRush Position Tracking help you track your keyword rankings and other key metrics over time to build profitable SEO campaigns.
Moz and Ahrefs offer similar tools to create full keyword performance dashboards. Keyword research services such as Stark Visibility not only monitor any page optimizations on the site to integrate SEO across the website in a sustainable approach, but also build a custom dashboard for clients to view the impact in real time.
If you outsource keyword research, service providers can monitor organic traffic to your pages to determine if keywords you want to rank for are driving traffic as expected. If that is not the case, they can “rinse and repeat” until you maximize performance.
Outsourcing the monitoring process solves the problem of business expertise and resources to manage your keyword research lifecycle. It also keeps both the business and agency in sync so that SEO stays consistent and effective when adapting to new content, information or positioning.
Summary
Understanding keyword optimization is a long-term effort that helps your startup scale. However, the cost and resource commitment makes outsourcing keyword research to experts such as Stark Visibility attractive to small and medium-sized businesses. Hire a keyword researcher to start growing organic traffic from day one.
Stark Visibility uses a modern SEO keyword research strategy to provide effective B2B lead generation among your target audience. We are experts in best-practice keyword theming, information architecture and creating scalable SEO campaigns from top-down.
Contact Stark Visibility today to understand how we can support your business.
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