How Little SEO Can Your Business Get Away With?

SEO has many a company flummoxed right from the get-go. It’s such an inexact and challenging to apply science that many startups neglect to even attempt it. This is a huge mistake. The key reason why is that it gives Google the wrong impression right from the start. They attempt to index pages, and without some semblance of SEO, often times they’re either not able to index, index the page incorrectly, or because on-page and internal SEO is such a large part of the search ranking algorithm, bury it so far down the search results as to be useless. This is a shame, as there are some solutions to begin to do SEO that don’t require a graduate of MIT to achieve.

Heard about Minimum Viable SEO?

Priceonomics.com coined the term, “minimum viable SEO“, which means pretty much what it says: exactlty what can you get by with in terms of SEO to start. Even though this is by no means an ideal strategy, it’s a lot better than not doing anything. Here are a few of the things they pointed out, with a few of our own ideas tossed in.

Decide on a keyword strategy – This will help you see not only what your site structure should look like, but also how fast you’ll be into profit. One option is to go after the long tail of search, meaning keywords that are typically 3-5 words long, often with product or model numbers. They don’t get a ton of searches everyday, but are infinitely easier to rank for. Add a few thousand of these up, and you win. An alternate way to go is to go after a single keyword, like “auto insurance San Diego” you’ll typically be trying to rank only your home page. If you have a business with a local presence, be sure you have local geo-modifiers on your keywords, as in the aforementioned example.

Use bread crumb navigation – You’ve seen this before. It is merely a set of links that show where you’ve been on the site, and where you are now. This is of great help for the searcher, (which Google likes) and takes care of a good deal of internal linkage. Here is what it commonly looks like: Home > Tablets > Apple > Ipad 2 3g

Use accurate title tags – Making sure the title tag on your page is accurate, meaning that it is or contains the keyword you wish that page ranked for, could very well be the most important SEO task you can do. Using local geo-modifiers is extremely important here too.

Performing minimum viable SEO is a good way to start, and definitely a lot better than not doing anything. Just don’t let it end there!