SEO is something that all business owners and marketers need to consider if they want to succeed online, and it is especially important for entrepreneurs. If you recently launched your startup then you are at a disadvantage when compared to large companies that have millions of dollars for marketing and years of published content.

As a result, you will need to focus your time and resources on creating valuable content that is relevant to your customers.

If you want to survive with online marketing, then your startup needs to focus on driving qualified traffic to your site if you’re going to boost conversions. Here is a quick breakdown of why keyword research is so important for your startup:

• You make money when people convert & buy from you.
• Increase conversions by attracting qualified leads.
• Qualified leads find you through search engines.
• Search engines use keywords to align content with online searches.
• People look for answers on search engines with specific keywords based on User Intent.

The relationship between User Intent, keywords, and search engines is the basis of Google and other search engines. Keyword research is a crucial part to build an organic online presence for your startup when you want to drive qualified traffic to your site.

Why User Intent Matters In SEO

Whenever someone searches for something on Google, they are asking a question. This means that as you build content for your website, you should start with the questions that your customers are asking and develop content to address those questions and needs.

Keyword research is more than trying to appear on search engines (though that is a goal) because keyword research helps you position your business to engage potential customers based on what they are searching for.

It’s great to drive lots of traffic to your site, but if you want to save time and money, then you need to focus on ranking pages on your site for relevant keywords that show high Buying Intent.

Keyword Research Starts With The Needs Of Your Customers

Since you launched your startup, you know there is a gap in the market between what people need and what is currently offered. Your startup company seeks to bridge the gap between the needs of customers and current solutions on the market.

Many startups fall into the trap of searching for the perfect keywords to rank in Google, but they forget about the most essential part of their business: their customers.

Since your customers are the ones who pay you, you need to base all of your actions on the needs of your audience.

SEO and online marketing are more than tricking search engines because it takes a lot of time and resources to produce content and build out a strategy to drive qualified traffic to your site.

If you want your SEO strategy to result in more sales, then you will need to make sure that your content is optimized for the needs of your customers.

Keyword research starts and ends with the needs of your customers, and if you want your content to get found by your customers and drive traffic to your site, then you need to optimize content around the needs of your audience.

Read The Minds Of Your Customers

A crucial part to offering a great product or service for your customers comes from understanding their needs, what they think about other solutions on the market, and why other products/solutions are not adequate to their needs.

A few advantages of understanding what your customers need and their thoughts about your competition includes:

• Product Alignment: If your startup is a product-driven company, then you can find it challenging to keep pace in a rapidly changing market. As the needs of your customers change, you want to keep ahead of the curve to ensure your long-term success.
• Marketing Orientation: Marketing is an expensive aspect of your startup because you have to invest time and resources to create great content that helps you drive more traffic and close more sales. Creating a customer-first marketing strategy will help you make better decisions so you can capture more market share.
• Increase Sales: No matter what your startup offers, you need to make sales. Understanding what your customers are looking for will help you close more sales and reading the minds of your customers is a great place to start.

Have you ever wondered how you could read the mind of your customers to learn what they want from a product or solution and be able to optimize your startup content to align with their needs?

Well, the good news is that you can use some free tools online to find this information to help you direct your SEO strategy.

Whether you are creating an online tool or a physical product, you can look to forums and other channels to see first-hand insight from your customers about products that they are already using. This information is a great way to not only create more valuable content, but you can also base your entire keyword research on specific phrases, questions, or other information for your customers.

If your startup is creating a physical product like a new electric razor for men, you can look to Amazon reviews to do some competitive research.

In this example, you can see a screenshot from the Amazon store, and if your startup is designing a new electric razor, then this is great information. You can see what people like about your competition while also finding elements that you can improve to get a competitive edge.

Competitive Analysis & Market Research

It can be challenging to identify the best keywords for your startup, so if you are having trouble to come up with an active keyword list, then you can look to your competitors for inspiration.

This approach is best if you have a limited marketing background, or if you need to launch your website quickly and don’t want to spend the time or resources to conduct more comprehensive keyword research.

In situations where you want to reverse engineer your competition, you can use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. I like to use Ahrefs for all of my online research, but since SEMrush is a free tool we will look at how to use this tool for this task.

Instead of spending time trying to find keywords on our own, it can be an excellent approach to leverage research from your competition.

The first thing that you need to do is identify a few of your competitors. This can be done with a simple search on Google, and once you have several competitors, you can start searching for the URL in SEMrush.

Once you have your competitor in SEMrush, you will be able to see a significant amount of information on them. For our purposes, you will want to look at the bottom of the screen at the “Top Organic Keywords” section.

While SEMrush is not perfect, using your competitors to get a baseline range of keywords to build your startup SEO strategy from. One thing to keep in mind is that you will need to find long tail keywords to rank for in your market, especially if your competitors have a strong online presence.

However, using SEMrush to reverse engineer your competition keywords can give you the starting point you need to build a strong online content strategy.

Start With Your Customers For Amazing Keyword Research

If you want your startup to succeed online then you need to understand the needs of your customers, identify opportunities in the market with a competitive analysis, and find keywords that potential customers are using to find the solutions that you provide.

Keyword research is essential for all businesses, but finding the best approach to yield quality results as quickly and easily as possible is even more important for entrepreneurs. Use the above tools and SEO marketing concepts to help your startup rank and bank in online marketing!

 

About the Author: Chris is a Digital Media Strategist in Orlando, FL. He loves helping business owners and nonprofits improve their online presence as a freelance copywriter, SEO marketer, and PPC manager.