If you are working to launch your startup, you know how much effort and attention to every detail is needed, especially during planning phases. SEO – that is, search engine optimization – is certainly an element to consider right from the very beginning of website development, whether it is a food e-commerce or an editorial portal for recipes.
This is why a specialized SEO agency such as Pro Web Consulting provides ad hoc startup consulting services to study specific strategies for this type of reality. The big difference is the SEO-first approach: a startup has the advantage of having full control over a website’s definition, that’s why to maximize its visibility, it is crucial that this it is structured immediately, ex-ante, in an optimized perspective, instead of adapting it ex-post (according to the typical SEO-compliant approach).
Stefano Brighenti, Managing Director at Pro Web Consulting, provides us with 5 useful SEO and strategic tips for startups who want to get the most out of the search engines:
- Internationalization
This is an increasingly important issue for those brands that deal with consumer goods turning to the global marketplace. The real question is: is your e-commerce ranked on search engines so that there is a correspondence between the website edition and the market that it addresses? If the answer is no, you have an internationalization problem. It happens often when you have multiple English editions for different countries and, for example, the UK version is ranked in India instead of the local dedicated edition. It is important to tackle this to avoid inconsistencies in currency and shipping conditions for each individual Country and, above all, to avoid organic traffic cannibalizations between one edition and another.
- Importance of content
It is a well-known rule on the web: “content is king”. Therefore, in order to interpret and index the content of any site, Google needs to have enough text available which is effective from a qualitative point of view. If publishing websites generally do not experience such criticalities, e-commerce on the other hand, especially in the field of food, does not seem to care enough about content: two lines of text are not sufficient to describe a category of food – it is necessary to have an appropriate text that exceeds 200-300 words, divided into paragraphs and arranged in such a way as to give useful and concrete information to the user. Search engines will therefore reward them, as they are now deemed to be trustworthy and authoritative on the subject.
- Category homepage, text duplication and product pages
By linking to the previous point and continuing to talk about e-commerce, it’s good to remember that there are a number of common problems that relate to the presence of text and to its type. First of all, it’s important to make sure that the various product categories are structured correctly: be careful to break them down clearly, using stretching terms and with good search volumes, and do not aggregate products arbitrarily or in an inconsistent way (for example, “oils and flavoring” could make sense, while “oils and jams” is a combination that no user would search for). For websites that sell non-branded products, it’s important to pay close attention to not having duplicate text and descriptions from other portals. As far as product pages are concerned, if your range is very wide, you will need to use on-site and off-site SEO effort rank them all.
- App indexing
Mobile devices and apps are increasingly becoming a source of quality and highly conversion-oriented sources of traffic. Intercepting it is essential for a startup, so it’s a good idea to provide the mobile version of your website and a dedicated app as soon as possible. Perhaps not everyone knows that apps can also be indexed and displayed to potential users based on their search queries: App Indexing can, in fact, enhance the visibility of the App on the store to increase downloads and to promote the use of the software among existing users.
- Diversification
In their anxiety of generating metrics for subsequent investment rounds, startups usually forget to cover marketing channels make their model economically viable and scalable: often SEO is considered as a secondary activity because it is an investment on the medium/long term – due to its initial incubation period – instead, it should be an element to consider from the design stage of its digital product.
This also in terms of traffic diversification: investing your own seed into a single channel represents is a great risk for the often-fragile model of a startup.
One of the latest case histories of Pro Web among food start-ups is GreekFlavours, a young reality born in October 2015, with the aim to spread in Europe and in the world the excellences of Greek gastronomy. Their e-commerce has invested in 3 essential assets: the high quality of products, with a focus on consumer trends like organic, vegetarian, vegan, gluten, sugar and kosher, efficient shipping, pan-European courier service guaranteed in 48h, and on SEO from the very early stages of website development.