Consider this scenario. You have a great new technology product you’re planning to bring to market. Immediately you start to think of ways you can attract investors to help bring your concept to life. You have several meetings with possible investors and the meetings go well. You leave them to think about their decision. While you’re not in front of them, the investors begin to do some research on the web and find nothing about your company. They do, however, find a lot of information about a similar company and all of the good it’s doing to educate consumers and businesses of its product’s value. Your prospective investors decide there is already a company that fills the need of your product and choose not to move forward with funding.
Now consider this scenario, you’ve done all the same as above, but this time you’ve been working behind the scenes on your web presence. When prospective investors do their own research of your company they see your website with helpful content and an active social media presence with an engaged community of followers. Based on their secondary research, the investors move forward with funding your startup.
Which scenario would you prefer?
All too often tech startups jump right to the funding part of the process and forget that it’s important to establish a web presence beforehand. By practicing a few white-hat search engine optimization techniques, you can create a strong foundation of information to help ease potential investors into believing in your product or service.
Start with a website
I know this seems like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t think of it, especially when they might not have the funds for it. I know budgets might be tight, but it’s important to get something up there to serve as the hub for your efforts. Try partnering with a local college or university to have a student develop your web presence. Just make sure they hand over the keys to the content management system at the end of the process, so you can edit content as needed.
Emphasize on-page SEO
Spend some time early on deciding what phrase or phrases someone who might like to fund your startup would search for. Then use those terms throughout the meta-data, meta-description, page title, URL and content of your website. Without the proper SEO foundation your other efforts will all be for nothing.
Blog consistently
Since you have your keywords laid out and you know what those investors are searching for, consider creating blog content around those keywords. While you want your posts to include a keyword, it should come naturally. If you have to force it, the reader is going to notice and so will Google.
Hubspot says B2B companies that blog one to two times a month generate 70 percent more leads than those who don’t blog at all. Consider an investor’s pain points and address those in your blog posts. Create a consistent blogging frequency and you’ll see your website traffic grow.
Utilize social media
If you’re creating all this great content, you’ve got to find a way to get it out to as many people as possible. One way of doing this is by developing and updating social media accounts.
Begin growing your followers and fans by posting relevant content. Here at WordWrite we suggest using the one-third approach. One third of your content should be about your brand and products, one third should be about your industry and expertise and one third should be actually having a dialogue with your community. If you post consistently, follow other accounts back and have an active dialogue with your fans and followers you’ll see your numbers grow.
By practicing the social media tactics above, you will have an active following that’s willing to share your content. Google sees this as third-party validation and will likely rank your content higher based on its social shares. In addition, the more eyeballs you have on it the better chance you have to receive inbound links from other websites. Inbound links are great for boosting your rank in the search engines.
Don’t let your investor strategy fail, due to a poor web presence. By spending some time and utilizing several techniques, you’ll build a strong foundation that will help an investor make his decision easier.
Learn more about the techniques listed above and see how a comprehensive inbound marketing plan can help your business grow its web traffic and leads. Download the eBook here.
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Emma Walter is a senior account executive for WordWrite Communications. You can find her on Twitter @emmasreallytall.
