Matt Jones: The Top Digital Marketing Tips For Start-Ups

As a start-up, time is one of the most valuable things to you. You need to find ways to do work efficiently, ensuring that it’s of a high standard while taking minimal time to complete – this is true throughout the entire business and that’s why we’re about to give you the most essential marketing and SEO tips for your start-up.

On-Site Optimisation

Your SEO efforts should start at the very beginning – with your website. Whether you’re building it yourself, using a CMS tool or outsourcing to an agency, it’s vital to make sure that your site is built with the best on-site optimisation possible.

To do this, you will need to create a list of what your most important target keywords/phrases will be. Once you have this list, you will know exactly which keywords to keep present throughout your site. From the URL structure, to metadata to content, you will need to ensure that you are including your target keywords in the right place – be sure you don’t stuff them in too much though! 

Optimising your on-site SEO will not only allow your site to start ranking in search engines for your target keywords quickly, but it can aso save you money and precious time in the future. If you create your site as you mean to go on, it will cut down on the amount of optimisation needed in the future.

Know Your Competitors

You’ve undoubtedly researched your industry for a long time by the time you’ve decided to start your business, but this tip is about knowing your competitors and their marketing strategies.

You’ll find that your competitors will be using some of the same marketing strategies throughout to varying degrees, but most will have a main focus on different channels. Email marketing may work best for one competitors while social media may work best for another – so it will take a little time to find which channel works best for you.

To start with, however, you’re going to want to see what seems to be working well universally throughout your competitors. This will help with your initial growth and acquisition, which will in turn lead to giving you more time and opportunities to try out different techniques.

There are some great tools out there, such as AHRefs and SEMrush, that will help you look into what strategies your competitors are using. Take a little time to research the tools and read into how they work as this will make it a lot easier when you finally sit down to use them and analyse your competition.

Master Your Marketing Tools

Tools such as Google Analytics and AdWords are invaluable tools for marketing but they can have one downfall – how complicated and complex they can become.

Fear not, however, as the lovely people over at Google have created free online training courses, to help you master all the amazing functionalities that are included.

For AdWords, there is an entire support section dedicated to teaching you all of the ins and outs, and once you’ve read through them and feel comfortable enough, you can take the AdWords Certification exams. If you don’t work for a PPC agency, these may not be necessary, however they are a very nice feature to pass and print off your certificates as a token of all your hard work.

Now onto the Analytics Academy – this is pretty similar to the AdWords training but just as useful. Not only will it walk you through how to use analytics to track your SEO efforts, but it will also help with your data analysis techniques, which may come in useful in the future.

The best part of both training courses mentioned above, is that they are completely free. They aren’t the quickest thing in the world to complete, however you will gain invaluable insights into the tools which will be a huge benefit to your personal skills and the business – which may help you stand out above the rest of the competition.

So there you have three of the most valuable marketing and SEO techniques that we’ve learnt in our first 18 months of business. These may not be the best techniques in the long run for your particular business but they should definitely be on to-do list when creating your business marketing plan.

My final, possibly most important, piece of advice, is to bear in mind that SEO and marketing best practices are always changing. As the world of technology and consumer behaviour constantly changes, so do the techniques in which we can market to our target audience. Find the best SEO and marketing blogs, influencers and news outlets, make sure you keep up to date with their latest posts and be prepared to change certain tactics.

Afterall, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint!

Matt Jones

Matt is an SEO Executive at Tutora, the UK’s leading private tuition platform, helping thousands of families find the perfect private tutor for their children. Tutora covers over 300 subjects, at every level from Primary, through to A-Level, all across the UK.