As mentioned in earlier posts in this series, traffic via SEO and pay-per-click is important in the early stages of your start up when you have relatively few channels for selling your product. In order to avoid a cash crunch and failure of your start up, you may want to be sure that your market is going to be big enough to create organic traffic.
Start up SEO need not be difficult, but mind the cost vs benefit
As a rough approximation, if your start up pursues a combination of social media, article marketing, forum and blog commenting and publishes articles daily without fail, there is a good chance that after 3 months or so, you will rank at number 1 for a search term that has a competition level of 0.01. But that takes a significant resource investment, so you have to consider whether your business model has sufficiently low risk for you to get a positive return on that investment. Low conversion rates and low prices for your start up's product can make organic SEO a good way to lose money.
Key risk 1: accurately measuring your start-up's competition and market potential
Google Keywords ranks competition for PPC, rather than competition in for organic search rankings. But you can use the competition for PPC as a good proxy for the level of intensity of organic SEO competition. Why? Because companies resort to PPC when they think that organic SEO is not sufficiently cost-effective, timely, or doesn't generate the traffic levels that they need - i.e. that there is too much competition. So a low level of PPC competition will tell you that there is still some room for organic SEO-based growth.
Reduce risk 1 for your start up: use a consultant
How far up the rankings you get depends on how much money you spend, and that will in turn depend on your sales volume, cost and profitability. To get analysis done on this, you may want to use a consultancy such as Exceltasks, which is very cost-effective and gives you quick results from a few inputs.
Key risk 2: your start up may not answer the user's query, even if you're top of Google
Another factor is that organic search terms with low competition may not be related to your product in the customer's mind. They just might not see your start up's website as being the answer to their query. This is a significant investment risk when your start up does organic SEO for low competition keywords.
Reduce risk 2 for your start up: use PPC's feedback loop to measure your start up's SEO ROI
Organic SEO doesn't have as effective a feedback and analytics loop as PPC marketing does. With PPC marketing, you can test the effectiveness of your low competition, high-scoring keywords that you have discovered using the method above. This will give you a good idea of the conversion rates that you can expect and your return on investment (ROI) for SEO.
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