If you are a bootstrapped startup, you don’t likely have the luxury of spending thousands of dollars on paid ads to get more traffic from search engines. For startups I always advise that SEO is the best channel for traffic and it should be on your mind from day 1. We have had some great success with our startups to get more traffic from search engines. I highly recommend you read that article as the practical advice there is worth its weight in gold.
Today, I am going to talk about some low hanging fruits that can help you get a lot of traffic early on.
Create comparison pages to get more traffic
Most people who are fed up with your competitor or don’t like them for any other reason, such as price or the CEO kills elephants etc., are searching for keywords like “alternatives to X” or “software like XYZ”.
If you create pages like that on your website to show them why are you better, the chances of them converting are higher but make sure you have a good DA & DR Matrix score. These are high intent buyers and they will convert like anything if your offering and your copy on that page is good. Essentially, this trick offers you traffic that converts.
Keep in mind that this has become a big business in itself where companies like Capterra or G2 create pages for all of the startups out there and start ranking well for their names. However, it is not so difficult to beat them if you keep building links to these pages from other websites.
Improve your interlinking game
Most search engines look at how your inner pages are linking out to each other. When Google started back in the day they relied on an algorithm called Page Rank. It is still relevant today even though some SEOs don’t agree to that.
By interlinking your pages creatively you increase the “value” of each page. When the value of a page goes up, the value of links on that page also goes up. Consequently the pages being linked from this page improve in value and eventually you have a website full of..well..”value”.
One way to do it would be to use something like Screaming Frog to look at your site’s architecture or an SEO auditing service like Kontely. If you see a lot of silos that is not good. Make sure that all of your pages are linked well and the most important pages, aka cornerstone content, has a lot of pages linking to them.
Add FAQs to your pages with schema
When you search on Google you must have seen sections that say “people ask” or something similar. Those questions are picked from different websites. It is relatively easy to rank for that spot. You can checkout the FAQ schema from the official schema website.
We have seen SEOs in e-learning industries doing really well by implementing this strategy.
See the following search result. The top two results are ads, then there is the top ranking page and right after that we have FAQs. Even if you rank second place on Google, you will still be beaten by your competitors that have FAQs.
Are low-hanging fruit queries are limited for SEO experts?