Building a website is laying the foundation of your startup’s marketing strategy. However, a foundation alone is not enough. It’s what you build on that foundation that really matters. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most rewarding but highly competitive digital marketing channels. Due to its competitiveness, it may come across as a distant dream for many startups, often causing them to make the mistake of ignoring it altogether. Here are a few reasons why startups must incorporate SEO into their marketing strategy.

Effective SEO begins at the planning phase of the startup marketing strategy

Having a robust marketing plan gives your startup a clear direction, and it’s crucial for the company’s growth. Some of the most important aspects of any marketing plan are setting up goals and objectives, identifying your target markets, budgeting, competitor analysis, and setting priorities by focusing on strengths. SEO strategy is not one size fits all, and it’s doomed to fail if pursued in that manner. Therefore, a marketing plan must be in strategic alignment with creating an SEO strategy specific to your startup’s goals and objectives.

SEO aims to improve your website’s rankings on search engines like Google to increase the organic traffic to your website. But getting any traffic to your website might not be the goal and objective of your startup. Therefore, aspects of your marketing plan determine your SEO strategy. The SEO strategy serves as the framework for structuring your website and generating content that translates your startup’s goals and objectives. Even the domain name you choose is related to SEO – all the more reason to include it in the pre-website marketing planning phase.

Web design: do it once and do it right

Time is crucial for startups, and a sense of urgency is a commendable trait, but that shouldn’t be the cause of any complacency. Unfortunately, complacency is precisely what will transpire if SEO is not part of your website design and will cause issues down the road. Search Engines are highly user-centric. They thrive on providing high-quality, valuable results to their user’s search queries, and they rank websites on top that are deemed valuable by a search engines’ highly sophisticated automated algorithms. Search engines’ web crawlers crawl the internet to discover, index, and rank websites according to their relevance and quality.

Technical SEO is a big part of website design and a crucial piece of the puzzle. Its optimization helps make your website crawlable by search engine bots. And each of its optimized aspects indicates the value of your website to search engine rank algorithms, which in return increases the chances of elevating your website’s rankings. The technical SEO elements you must know about and have as part of your web design are webpage loading speed, website security, mobile-friendliness, responsive web design, no duplicate content, XML sitemap, no broken links, improper use of robot.txt files and structured data.

SEO is not an entity of its own

Improving organic visibility for your website seems a plain and simple objective of SEO. But the different factors needed to achieve that objective are much broader, and their implementation can have a positive impact on various aspects of your startup. As mentioned above, technical SEO has all the elements that increase your website user’s experience.

Link building and online mentions are a substantial part of SEO strategy and a ranking factor. SEO strategists build links and mentions using PR, content marketing, local citations, directories, influencer marketing, and guest blogging. These strategies can get your startup exposure that results in engagement and earns your startup backlinks from various authoritative websites relevant to your startup. Backlinks and mentions display a vote of confidence in your startup products both to your target audience and to the search engine ranking algorithms.

Keyword research is market research

You can learn a great deal about your potential customers by doing keyword research. For instance, you can learn what questions they are searching for related to your products and services, and which of your products and services has the most and least searches per month. These are very powerful insights, especially for the startup. It helps you discover new topics that matter to your potential customers and reveals valuable information about your products and services.

Keyword Research is at the core of SEO strategy. By learning popular keywords and phrases used by your potential customers to search for products and services related to your startup, you can incorporate them into your content to get relevant keywords and drive high traffic to your website.

You can also target keywords or long-tail keywords with low search volumes that are less competitive to improve your page rankings quickly compared to the highly searched competitive keywords that are hard to rank on search engines. All of this is a crucial part of your SEO strategy.

Building brand awareness, trust and credibility

Achieving top rankings on search engines for keywords related to your products and services is tantamount to reaching the pinnacle of brand awareness, trust, and credibility. That’s not possible when you are just getting started. But the SEO strategies you deploy go hand-in-hand with building that brand awareness, trust, and credibility. These three factors are critical both to the search engines and to your potential customers.

I tend to collect email like some might collect Star Wars action figures. OK, that’s not a perfect analogy because mostly I collect email because I think I might need it later, but never do. That generally equates to me having way too many emails sitting in my inbox, most of which I’ve read and don’t need anymore.

And that can cause problems, especially in the Gmail mobile application. When you have thousands (or tens of thousands) of emails, the Gmail app search function can get bogged down. Because of that, I tend to go eliminate the problem every few months (or every year, when I get too busy and forget the whole “every few months” thing).

The problem with the Gmail app is there’s no easy way to do a mass delete. Even when you try with the web-based version, you’ll find you can only select 100 emails at a time. When your inbox is overflowing, that’s not a good enough option.

So, what do you do? I’m going to show you a handy trick for mass deletion. Unfortunately, this only works on web-based Gmail. The good news is that your mobile Gmail app will thank you for taking care of this.

What you’ll need
The only thing you need is a Google account. Of course, you’ll also need an inbox filled with previously read emails that you don’t need to keep. That’s important here: If you have certain emails that you need to keep, either mark them as unread or move them to another folder, otherwise they will be deleted.

You’ve been warned.

How to mass delete in Gmail

Open Gmail and type is: read in the search bar. At this point, you should only see those emails you have already read (or at least the first 100). With your read email on display, check the box (Figure A) to select all of the messages.

Figure A

If you have a ton of unread messages, you will have only selected the first 100 (because… Google). To select all of those unread messages, you must click the Select All Conversations That Match This Search link (Figure B). Note: This link will only appear if you have more than 100 unread messages.

Figure B

One word of warning: If you see an email listed (after selecting all unread emails) that you don’t want to be deleted, if you uncheck it you will revert the Select all conversations that match this search option. In other words, you need to make sure you’ve collected those read emails you want to save into a different folder (or marked them as unread) before going through this. Now, we need to delete all of those read emails by clicking the Trash icon (Figure C).

Figure C

After clicking the Trash icon, you’ll be prompted to OK the bulk delete of the read email. Click OK and every one of those read emails will be sent to the trash. Depending on how many read emails you are deleting, this can take some time. In the end, you’ll have a much cleaner Gmail inbox.

And that’s how you mass delete email in Gmail. Enjoy that reclaimed space and more efficient Gmail app search.