The survival of a new business is highly dependent on its first few customers – say, a hundred or a thousand. These customers do not guarantee that a business will be successful or do wonders, but they surely give you the right feedback from the real world. At the same time, the revenue generated from these customers can be used as an investment for the business.
As a new business, it is one of the biggest challenges to land these first hundred customers or clients. No matter how optimistic you are about the potential of your business, the customer will not appear magically. Just wanting new customers will not do the job. So, it becomes crucial to have plans that entice your potential customers to use your products/services.
Having a strong digital presence is the key to bring new customers in a short period, and for that, nothing works better than Search engine optimization (SEO).
Here are five SEO tips you should follow to land your first 100 customers as soon as possible:
Be Clever With The Keyword
Keywords are the cornerstone for every successful SEO strategy, and it is going to be very helpful in bringing new customers. Before developing an SEO strategy, it is essential to know your target audience.
Imagine a prospect looking for a website auditing tool. They might search the web for ‘best website auditing tools” or “website auditing tools for small businesses.” The results in the SERP will have many website auditing tools, one of which can be yours – if you have used the appropriate keyword and your content is relevant. This is how keywords research can be a game-changer in terms of customer acquisition.
However, not every keyword can generate revenue for you. In the initial phase of your business, you should use keywords that bring the most conversions, i.e., long-tail keywords. These keywords have more weight and a higher rate of conversion.
You can get a list of highly effective keywords using different tools. One of the most popular tools that can help you with this is SE Ranking. Its keyword suggestion feature does a great job in analysing different variants of keywords, including long-tail keywords. This tool also helps you to find pages with the highest traffic and the ranking of the page on the particular keyword. Also, it can show the estimated traffic and traffic value to get deep insights of yours competitors’ traffic.
Source: SE Ranking
Content Is The Philosopher’s Stone
Yes, keywords do a great job in making your site reach better prospects. However, without valuable content, keywords are nothing more than a word salad. A valuable piece of content can do much more than just carry your keywords. It can be used as a tool to convert potential customers. For new businesses, content can help build trust and make you appear more reliable. Moreover, it is a shareable resource that can be used to reach more customers.
Here’s how a good piece of content can help you get your initial customers: When people search for products and services similar to what you offer, they’ll find many results in the SERP. These results will include blog posts, social media posts, and other various types of serp features to give your appropriate answer to your query. When your content is relevant, engaging, and solves problems, it will show up before others. This can allow you to convert leads into customers and build good relationships with visitors.
Content is said to be the core of inbound marketing. And with the help of a solid inbound strategy and valuable content to drive, you can see content act as a Philosopher’s stone. It’ll make customers knock on your doors for products and services.
Give Attention To On-Page SEO
There is no shortage of reasons that say On-Page SEO is crucial for the success of new companies searching for their first customers. Some of the reasons are that the user experience becomes better, crawlers can quickly go through the website for indexing, essential elements are optimized, rankings get increased, etc.
Here are some of the essential steps involved in On-Page SEO checklist:
- Making the title tags unique and self-descriptive
- Minimising the bounce rate and loading time of the website
- Making the alternative texts descriptive and keyword-optimized
- Heading should have relevant descriptions and optimised keywords
- Improving navigation and indexing by using internal links
- The URLs used should not be difficult to read
These steps ensure that visitors find what they came looking for. And when visitors get what they want easily, they get happy – a happy visitor is always a potential customer. Hence, On-Page SEO increases your chance to get more customers.
Give Your Visitors The Best Possible User Experience
So now that we know that happy visitors can easily become your customers, it is crucial to strategize ways to make them so. One of the best ways of doing so is by giving them a flawless experience when they are on your website.
When a visitor lands on your website for the very first time, most probably, they are going to review your products and services based on that first impression. If this first experience is not good, not only will you lose the sale, but 88% of the total visitors might not visit the website ever again. A new business that has not even 100 customers can’t afford to lose these visitors and future engagement.
Here are some of the SEO metrics that are crucial in terms of visitor experience:
- Loading time of the page: No one likes to wait for a site to load. You should make the navigation effortless by making your website as fast as it can be. Use the best web hosting provider you can find to ensure that your website is top-notch and performs well on technical levels. For instance, consider using VPS with cPanel for greater control and optimization. Pixpa serves your website with lightening fast servers from Amazon, also the Smart CDN uses the nearest server to boost the page speed.
- Responsiveness of the design: The site that does not adjust well with different screen sizes is not liked by visitors. You can make it convenient for them by using responsive designs.
- Use of heading tags: By using heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>), you can make the content skimmable. The more scannable and readable it is, the better.
- Meta data: Create short and compelling descriptions for your content because Google uses it in search engine result pages (SERPs).
- Use typographical emphasis: You can use bold and italics to emphasise any specific point or term. This improves the message delivery.
Go Mobile and Go Local
Google has put a much-needed emphasis on mobiles and local content. These two have a beautiful relation which is clearly visible statistically. A survey by Safari Digital shows that 30% of the search queries that come from mobile phones are related to local businesses. And out of this 30%, over 78% of visitors end up making a purchase. So, the point is, to drive visitors to your online and offline store and convert them into customers. Using omnichannel and phygital mediums of marketing like QR codes, beacons and NFC tags can drive offline traffic online, improving conversions and provide opportunities for engagement and retargeting.
Let’s Wrap It Up
It is not possible to succeed in any business without customers, and on the flip side, SEO is one of the most effective practices for a successful business. Combined with other marketing strategies (and a good night’s rest for the most productive mornings), SEO focus is key to growing a healthy business. Getting the first hundred customers is much more challenging than retaining them. In such a case, SEO will turn out to be the saviour and can help make your customer acquisition very effective. Not only in the initial phase, but SEO will grow your business in the long run too. Implement the five tips mentioned above in the article, and cross the hundred, even thousands, in no time.
