Maximizing Go-To-Market Strategies For SEO

Working for startups and companies launching new products, features, and verticals consistently makes it very important to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck and not make startup seo mistakes that many others make, including fortune 500 companies. The point is, you want to leverage the most out of the buzz, the press, […]

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Working for startups and companies launching new products, features, and verticals consistently makes it very important to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck and not make startup seo mistakes that many others make, including fortune 500 companies.

The point is, you want to leverage the most out of the buzz, the press, the publicity, etc. that you can get via a launch of a new product, vertical, or feature.

Conversion and entry points

First and foremost, you need to be sure that the places that you want to maximize your SEO efforts to matches user intent. Obviously this is the case with any SEO program and is inexcusable to not have a destination that drives user conversion, yet it happens all the time. Create a Landing Page or entry point that completely matches the users intent.

Be sure to not only think of things from a marketing perspective, but also, stay close to the product team and find out release dates and feature sets. You need to understand the product so you know the types of entry points necessary and if there are multiple products, categories, etc. that need to be made visible to search engines. Be sure that these pages go live in conjunction with the product or feature release date.

Creating relevance with a content strategy

Starting to build relevance pre-launch is a good way of getting a jump start on SEO efforts that can take months at a time to get rankings for, especially if you are dealing with heavily competitive verticals like financial products.

Put together a content strategy that leads users to the new products or features you are launching soon. If you have a blog, leverage that blog to start posting content that focuses on that feature, provides insight into the product, or is newsworthy around a vertical. All of this starts to build relevance for your domain around the launch from your product team.

Another strategy is start to build content that is tailored to mid and long tail users around the topic. For example, if you are launching a something in the sports vertical around basketball training, you could develop articles on “How To’s” and “Tutorials” for people to read. After the product goes live, you can include BABs (Big Ass Buttons) and Call to actions on the page for sign up or product offerings.

Generating buzz authority via social media

Social Media is playing a big part in SEO and how, we as online marketers, get traction on the SEO programs and campaigns that we develop. Take some time a couple months prior to launch to craft a social media marketing plan that helps your SEO efforts.

I just talked about how important it is to get content on the site pre-launch to start building relevance. Use social media sites as a tool to start building authoritative links to the relevant content. Infographics are also widely popular, so don’t be afraid to put out an extremely informative one that people will pick up and link back to you with.

Be sure to do all this pre-launch. I’ve found it very successful to do a few content pieces and infographics pre-launch to start generating buzz around a topic area before the actual product was released. Then, a recap of the product launch day to start moving readers to the new product offering. Finally, continue to push with more content around the topic post launch to continue building fresh content and buzz around your domain.

Maximizing the buzz from press and publicity

Again, traditionally press releases are very helpful with SEO from a link building and buzz generation standpoint. Yet, with that, so many startups and larger organizations underutilize the targeted links to relevant content in their press releases. It also provides journalists and writers some context when they break news around the launch and might give you an opportunity to get those links from their domains.

You can also help your link building efforts when doing journalist or blogger outreach. Create a link back plan that you can send out to strong relationships and contacts. Provide them link attribution details within your outreach program and work with your PR team to craft persuasive ways of getting them to do so.

Linking, both internally and externally

After you’ve created content, it is easy to let it linger even though it has a good amount of link equity build up you can pass through the site. Go back to that content and start insert links to the relevant sections of your site. Even better that trying to fit links in, craft content that you can literally just slap links on keywords within the post to ease the burden later on.

Externally, leverage all of the above for link building efforts. Get some directory links, do some guest blogging, link to the content within existing guest blogging spots, etc. Find creative ways to start generating externally links to the products you are now offering.

Remember to create a strategy!

I keep saying it and I still continue to see startups and larger, more mature organizations forget to include SEO in go to market strategies for products, let alone not having one at all. Make sure that you generate all the buzz that you get when launching new features and products and turning that into SEO juice that helps you rank for highly relevant keywords.

Have your companies made these mistakes in the past? What are some things that you do to maximize a “go-to-market” strategy to help SEO?

Keep the conversation going, follow me on twitter or become a facebook fan!


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Tony Adam
Contributor

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