Do you want your start-up to be known through your website? Then it needs to appear on the first page of Google. SEO has become an essential marketing tool to gain visibility on search engines. It increases the chances of attracting traffic and therefore prospects. How do you go about it?

The benchmark SEO consists of studying and analysing your competitors' websites that have found a place on the first page of Google. This marketing technique allows you to understand the action plans of your competitors' websites, i.e. what allowed them to achieve a good positioning: user path, site architecture, content marketing. It also gives you the keys to stand out from other websites, as Google's indexing robots penalise duplicate content.

The SEO benchmark helps your startup to set goals to create an original and relevant website.

How will people find you on the web? What queries will they send to Google? These questions are at the heart of a content marketing strategy. You need to find the right keywords, which reflect your startup and what you offer to your future customers. They must be in line with your startup's theme and also with the geographical area of your activity.

Let's take the example of a Marseille-based startup that delivers bouillabaisse to the home. In order to be positioned in first place on Google, it must carry out a keyword study on the semantic fields related to Marseille, home delivery and this culinary speciality.

As you can see, relevant keywords contribute to the SEO referencing of your startup on search engines. There are many tools to identify these keywords.

Optimising content with keywords is not the only way to boost a start-up's website's natural referencing on Google. It also requires a structure that facilitates its indexing by the search engine's crawlers.

HTML tags and the presence of internal links, i.e. between pages of the same website, facilitate this exploration. In addition, SEO optimisation of the content of tags and page URLs helps your site to rank on the first page of Google.

The netlinking is a technique that consists of placing external hyperlinks on websites dealing with the same theme as your website. Google estimates the popularity of a website according to the quality and quantity of these backlinks.

Quality external links are present on reliable and authoritative websites on the subject. There are tools to identify such websites, which are essential to know in order to set up partnerships.

SEO tree structure and fluidity

The tree structure of a website is its structuring and organisation, i.e. HTML tags, URLs, navigation menus. The more fluid and error-free it is, the easier it is for Google robots to crawl the website.

A well-constructed tree structure also offers users a pleasant visiting experience. It is therefore important to think about this in advance, especially if you want to create an e-commerce site that will include many product categories.

Why is it difficult to explore a site?

• There are 404 errors, i.e. URLs that no longer exist because they have been modified or deleted. To avoid these errors, redirects must be set up.
• The navigation menus are too busy and poorly laid out. Users must be given a point of reference, otherwise they will leave the site. Finding the home page easily is essential.
• The depth of a site is too deep, i.e. the number of times a user has to click from the home page to the landing page. It is recommended not to exceed 4 clicks.

The creation of original and unique content

The content of a website concerns the texts and all the media: images, videos. Please note that Google strongly penalises duplicate content on several websites. Internet users do not appreciate them either. For the same reasons, you should avoid pages with identical content within the same website, whether it be titles, paragraphs or media.

To offer original content, study the competition. To stand out, keeping a blog is a good solution. It is an opportunity to address your theme in depth and on different subjects.

A platform that offers legal advice, for example, is well advised to blog about legal news, give definitions and even provide free advice.

Blogging is a great way to position SEO optimized pages related to your startup in the first results of Google. Thanks to internal linking, users are then directed to your products or services.

Why is SEO strategy important for startups?

You have certainly carried out market research and you know the profile of your future customers. You have also created a website to present your start-up, its products and services. How will your future customers find you on the internet?

To gain visibility, popularity, stand out from the competition, attract many Internet users, reach prospects, you must invest in SEO.