Winning new customers for startups is one of the major challenges and can be very expensive too. Most new ventures rely heavily on paid advertising to get users in, but this strategy soon becomes infeasible.
Average CAC, according to HubSpot, has increased by almost 50 percent over the past five years, worsening the situation for startups trying to turn a profit.
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) can become a game-changer for startups. In the following article, we will discover how SEO greatly helps reduce CAC in startups and how we can plug this into their scaling strategies.
What is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total spend of all activities to acquire a customer. It involves marketing campaigns, sales activities, advertising, and other such expenditures.
In the case of startups with limited funds, high CAC would hinder their growth and lead to unsustainable business practices. Hence, businesses should investigate tactics that reduce CAC with the same quality of customer engagement, of which SEO is one of the most effective.
How SEO Reduces Customer Acquisition Costs?
1. Drives sustainable organic traffic than ads
Paid advertising, like Google Ads or Facebook Ads, is something that needs to be funded on an ongoing basis, so costs will increase. According to WordStream, their average CPC (Cost Per Click) for Google ads across industries equals $2.69.
Research from BrightEdge also reveals that organic search accounts for 53% of all website traffic, which means that income from a good source could drive cost-effective customer acquisition.
New business startups need to spend a lot on obtaining leads. On the contrary, SEO provides organic visibility to their potential customers without spending more on ad costs.
2. Builds long-term brand authority
It is important to note that, when establishing its position for relevant industry keywords, a startup tends to build trust and credibility within the niche. This helps them to acquire leads over time from organic searches, unlike the paid methods, where the ads disappear once the budget runs out.
An adequately optimized blog post or landing page accumulates leads for a long time without needing further marketing spend, thus reducing CAC over time.
3. Higher conversions with SEO-optimized content
When startup companies use SEO to attract high-intent users who are actively searching for solutions, they can have a very meaningful impact on their businesses.
According to a report by HubSpot, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate against a measly 1.7% for outbound marketing strategies like cold calling and paid ads.
Targeted keywords and valuable content drive qualified traffic that is highly likely to convert into paying customers, minimizing acquisition costs.
4. Leads to higher retention
User experience is an important ranking factor for Google. An optimized site that is fast-loading, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate will create a great user experience with a lower bounce rate and higher engagement.
53% of mobile users will leave if a site is loading in more than 3 seconds to load (Google). Startups must invest in speed and usability upgrades to reduce supply drop-offs and maximize the returns on their SEO investment.
SEO Strategies for Startups to Reduce CAC
Startups looking to reduce customer acquisition costs will need to implement proven SEO strategies. These strategies include advanced methods to prioritize the latest algorithm updates.
Let’s begin:
1. Target high-intent keywords
Keyword intent, or user intent, is used to make users understand the context behind the content. There are basically four types of user intent:
- Informational: When users are looking for some information about a topic.
- Navigational: When users are looking for a particular website or a page.
- Commercial: When users look for or research a product to buy or purchase.
- Transactional: When users are looking to buy or make a purchase of the product.
You can use Google Keyword Planner, RanksPro, and Semrush to collect high-intent, low-competition keyword suggestions for the landing page content.
Try to capture long-tail keywords with high user intent (example: “HR software for startups” not “HR software”). Service/product pages, blogs, and landing pages can be optimized for those keywords.
You can use local keywords based on targeted location, for example: SEO company India, painting service in Sydney, etc. based on your services or business. This will capture local audiences more frequently.
2. Implement a value-driven content strategy
Execution of the content strategy can allow the brand to establish itself as a thought leader, generate very good-quality leads, and build a long-term relationship with customers.
Here are the tips to create SEO-optimized content:
- Comprehensive Guides: The comprehensive coverage of complicated areas regarding your startup or industry is to be created. This includes step-by-step instructions, best practices, and expert views.
- Compelling Case Studies: Show how your startup business helped real customers achieve their objectives, fully backed by figures, metrics, and testimonials singing praises for your startup.
- Authoritative Whitepapers: Generate thorough, researched whitepapers focused on the prevailing industry trends, challenges, or solutions. Now, position the brand as a thought leader and invite excellent leads.
Articulate how topics create authority and improve search engine rankings. Create a mesh of networked content for improved SEO performance across the site.
Let high-value guest posting become the only mode of exposure, rather than finding burnt means on as many sites as you can.
3. Do technical optimizations
The technically sound website will allow the search engine to crawl the content, index it, and understand the content. Thus, improving rankings and experience as well.
Fast-loading websites are ranked by Google as well as by the users primarily. Page speed is a ranking factor that focuses on user experience. To better understand your website performance in terms of mobile and desktop, use Google PageSpeed Insights.
It offers specific recommendations for improving page speed, such as:
- Image Optimization: You can optimize image files very easily and efficiently by compressing them using Tiny PNG or ImageOptim.
- Minification of CSS and JavaScript: All unnecessary characters and white spaces should be removed from a file to decrease its size.
- Leverage Browser Caching: In this case, these static resources would be stored in users’ browsers for future use without repeatedly sending requests to your server.
- Gzip Compression Enable: It refers to the feature of compressing the files before being sent to the browsers.
- Reducing Server Response Time: Optimize your server to achieve the fastest response time.
- Content delivery Networks (CDN): A CDN will serve your content through many servers, thus reducing latency.
Most of Google’s indexing goes in favor of mobile-friendly websites of sites. A seamless mobile experience is critical in SEO and user satisfaction; make sure that all the content on the desktop site is also found on the mobile site. This might require support from web development experts as well.
4. Build high-quality backlinks
Backlinks are essentially votes coming from other websites through which search engines come to understand that the content is quite valuable and trustworthy.
In a highly competitive arena, it is very crucial to build a very strong profile concerning backlinks to better improve the authority of your website and search rankings.
Here are the backlink strategies that can help you:
- Targeting industry-relevant blogs: The first step is to identify niches for which your blogs can showcase useful information for the target audiences. Provide unique, valuable information for a better experience.
- Directory Listings: List your startup business in the relevant industry directories as well as software review sites. This generates backlinks, referral traffic, and certainly helps increase the credibility of your brand.
- Connect with publications: Identify media outlets that cover technology, business, or your specific startup niche. Offer exclusive insights, data, or expert commentary to journalists.
- Utilize HARO (helping a researcher out) technique: This is a platform that hooks journalists with expert sources. Reporters submit queries seeking expert opinions or information on specific topics.
Building relationships with key influencers in your industry can also create natural opportunities for link building. Attend online and offline conferences. Just make sure not to buy backlinks; rather, earn them naturally and organically.
Key Takeaways
In the fast-paced world of startups, where every penny must be utilized effectively, SEO emerges as a vital pillar for sustainable growth. By prioritizing organic visibility, a startup can establish a foundation of consistent traffic, which reduces customer acquisition costs (CAC) and helps retain customers over time.
While there is always a need for quick results, this provides no real advantage compared to the long-term benefits of a well-executed SEO strategy.
Investing in SEO goes beyond achieving high rankings; it builds an asset that one can hold onto while still enjoying returns, offering protection against an uncertain future.