Air quality monitoring startup Zeptive is typically No. 1 when you search Google for “vape detector” and other phrases critical to their business. This is no coincidence. It’s the result of a strategic approach to search engine optimization that has helped the company generate leads, educate customers, and expand its audience.
Based in Andover, Mass., Zeptive built SEO into its marketing strategy from the start. “It was very clear that SEO was going to be critical for us,” said Chief Growth Officer and Co-Founder Steve Milt. Around 75 percent of Zeptive’s web traffic is organic–which means the company is bringing the majority of its visitors to its site without pay-per-click advertising.
A Johns Hopkins alum, Milt says he tells startup founders and students in his mentorship network the same: “SEO can be the best marketing investment you ever make. In fact, depending on your industry and product, it’s where your first marketing dollar should be directed,” he said. “It takes time, but it also helps focus the way you think about your business, your market, and your audience.”
Zeptive’s Educational Approach
Teen vaping is a major public health concern right now. Over several years, Zeptive’s team has worked with professional writers, editors, and illustrators to create a wealth of helpful information about vaping, ranging from articles on how to tell if your teen is vaping to what schools, hotels, and workplaces can do to curb vaping activity. “We take a lot of time and care,” Steve said. “We try to think deeply and focus ahead of where the business is going.”
Building a collection of useful articles, then linking them to sources like peer-reviewed journals, helps build page authority (a ranked system used by search engines to offer relevant results) for people searching for Zeptive. It also offers prospective customers resources, cutting down on the time customers spend researching on other sites. “It’s about creating value,” Steve said. “We’re concerned about helping our customers be successful and recognize that in vaping, we’re only one piece of the solution.”
SEO Keyword Research and Beyond
“Thinking about keywords is critical,” Steve said. Zeptive’s team considers the keywords used on its website and its articles carefully, and works with an SEO consultant to keep things running at full speed.
Quality content, a solid, customer-oriented website, and good backlinks (pages that link back to your website) are crucial too; gone are the days of stacking a bunch of keywords at the bottom of a page.“Get your content out there,” Milt said. “Make sure your word counts and tags are appropriate. Make sure the site is easy for a search engine to crawl.” This is usually also better for your website visitors–for example, pages with headers and subheadings are easier to read and scan, which is why search engines assign them more authority.
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Building backlinks is also important–link to other pages within your site, but also work to ensure your site is linked on other high-authority pages. Milt said one way to do this is to attend events–either to network or speak–and make sure the presenters are linking your company on the event summary page. Good media coverage is also worth its weight in SEO gold, since news sites usually have substantial monthly traffic.
A Long Game
It took a while for Zeptive to start ranking in search results–and that’s just part of the process. It takes six months to a year to really get going. “When we first launched the site, we were on page 8 of the search results,” Steve said. “It took a long time to get to page 1. And then, it took a long time to get to #1 on the keywords we really cared about.”
Milt strongly encourages other startups to develop an SEO strategy. “Just keep chipping away at it,” he said. “It’s a lot of consistent effort–there are no secrets.”
