You roll your eyes when people talk of SEO and keywords and online attraction, but are you rolling them away from opportunity?

The online world is busy and chaotic. Millions of voices demand attention and proclaim their business the best. The online air practically hums with the sound of lost internet voices trying to catch the attention of busy eyes and minds.
Everyone knows that search results can throw up a million names and that any result sitting past the first page may as well be at the bottom of a cliff. Everyone knows that one question asked of Google can take you down an internet rabbit hole, only to emerge hours later and not that much wiser.
Online is brilliant, loud and demanding, but it is also a portal to customers and growth that anyone can use. It isn’t just the realm of the wealthy or big business as smart start-ups can harness its potential to make themselves heard.
To be one of the voices that catch the eye and enter the mind, you need a vibrant online presence.
Online offers the start-up an opportunity to become competitive and dynamic and stand out from competitors. It allows you a fairly level playing field where you can be first without having to own the biggest budget.
Related: 5 SEO trends every entrepreneur needs to know
With the right social strategy, you can build awareness, encourage customer engagement and consideration and, ultimately, get them to buy your product or solution. There are a few tools you can use that will help you to build your presence online, and here are a few of the best:
1. Alexa

You can find Alexa at www.alexa.com and you can use this tool to improve your SEO, find keywords that will make it easy for you to rank and even check the keywords your competitors are using.
2. Semrush

Visit www.semrush.com to get help in researching the right keywords, track your keyword rankings, improve your website’s SEO health and track any SEO issues that need your attention.
3. Moz

If you go to https://moz.com/researchtools/ose you can get some very useful assistance in tracking detox links and finding competitor links. Detox links are those links which can impact a website's SEO due to their durability. Sometimes links that were developed a while ago are no longer considered good links based on revised Google guidelines. These need to be cleaned up or ‘detoxed’ so you reduce any risk of negative rankings on Google.
These simple tools will support your start-up in growing its presence, building the right awareness and engaging with the right people. It isn’t quite the in-depth complexity of a fully-fledged SEO campaign, but it is enough to get your start-up flexing its online muscles and gaining enough traction to make investing into a proper campaign worthwhile.