Your website is your ‘shop window to the world’ and in a time where startups need to generate nearly all their leads online, no aspect is more critical to marketing than a good website. But what do we mean by ‘a good website’ and what makes for the best startup websites?
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Best Startup Websites need Good Design
This may seem obvious but when we say ‘good design’ we don’t just mean that the website needs to look pretty. Looks are important but are also in the eye of the beholder. There are hundreds of websites that look beautiful but that take ages to load, aren’t updatable without editing HTML, or aren’t responsive so won’t load on mobile.
A good website design loads fast, has a CMS (Content Management System) that allows non-technical users to update it and is responsive so it runs well on mobile. It also needs to be structured well so that it ranks easily in terms of SEO.
The best websites Talk about Customers more than about the company
We’ve all met that person who never stops talking about themselves. Some companies do this too, with their websites only talking about features, their tech and what awards they’ve won.
The best startup websites talk about their customers and the challenges their customers face. Take a look at AX Semantics, a European AI startup. Instead of talking about AI tech and filling their site with buzzwords, they lead with “Save time and grow your business by scaling content creation”. Slack is another great example, they push the ability to easily communicate with partners, because they start charging enterprise licenses when you need to let partners access your slack account.
It can be tricky to get some outside perspective on what your website is telling people who know nothing about your company. If you’d like an outside perspective, you can request a free website content audit here.
The Best Websites have an SEO Strategy
It’s no use having the best website if no one is able to find it. There are some technical things you need here (site maps, an SEO Plugin and a site that loads quickly) but what you really need is a strategy. To build your SEO strategy, you should start with your target buyers. What might your target buyers be searching for? Then you can use tools like google keyword planner, to craft a list. If you’d like to understand what your website is currently doing in terms of SEO, you can request a free audit here.
Once you have this list, you need to divide the keywords into long tail keywords and short keywords, and identify which long tail keywords you want to be the expert on.
Then, and this is the most tricky part, you need to write top notch content in the form of cornerstone pages (targeting the long tail words where you want to be the expert), blog posts, and downloadable content.
The best startup websites aren’t always those that win awards for design. The best sites are those with a clear strategy behind them and that help their startup to generate more qualified leads online.
So to return to the question: how to scale a Startup in 2021. You need to understand your market, target buyer and the problem you solve. Then you need a digital marketing approach built on a strong website that translates your strategy to the world.
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