Kickstarter campaigns have brought a lot of ideas into reality. It’s a go-to platform for many entrepreneurs and creators because they can get funding without going through the long process of applying for grants, loans, and other forms of financing. But if you want your crowdfunding campaign to achieve its full potential, you might want to consider driving attention to it using SEO.
SEO is essential to boosting awareness of your brand and driving traffic both during and after your campaign. In this article, we’ll look at the best practices that you can use to fine-tune your SEO for your Kickstarter campaign.
Key takeaways
- SEO improves the visibility of your product and brand
- Optimizing your website for SEO is critical if you want to rank higher on search engine results.
- Add focus keywords on your content, meta descriptions, URL slug, and alt texts to drive traffic to your site.
- Social media platforms provide backlinks to help you create more awareness about your campaign.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your web pages to rank better. When you post any content online, you need to optimize it so that it can appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Google and other search engines direct visitors to your site or platform based on the content relevance, interactions received, and the number of visitors.
Crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter can succeed or fail depending on whether they are visible to the public. If the campaign does not capture attention, you might not get the funding you’re looking for.
Kickstarter SEO best practices
As you set up your Kickstarter campaign, you need to lay enough groundwork to achieve your goals. Here are some of the best SEO practices.
Determine your product positioning and focus early on
Before launching your campaign, you need to know your target audience. For instance, if you are raising money for video game development, your campaign should target an audience interested in this product.
Therefore, you must develop content with the right call-to-actions to reach your target. By positioning the product early on, you can tailor SEO strategies around your campaign to ensure you meet your fundraising goals.
Establish a clear brand identity and name
For SEO to be effective, you need a unique brand name and identity. Every campaign on Kickstarter has a name that clearly states what you are fundraising for. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of campaigns on the platform; therefore, you need to stand out.
Statistics show that between 2017 and 2023, the total amount of funding pledged on Kickstarter projects has more than doubled. Additionally, if you compare Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the former has a higher success rate.
With all these projects listed, you need to craft a brand identity that people can easily find when looking for campaigns to contribute to.
Determine a keyword focus for your niche
The keywords are an essential part of your SEO strategy. If you want to fund a new video game, you need to focus on specific keywords that your potential investors will be looking for. For instance, your campaign should have keywords like “video games”, “gaming”, or “new video game”.
For Kickstarter SEO to be effective, you must use these keywords on your titles, URL, alt texts, and image file names. Find closely related keywords that will drive people to your campaign. You can get this information by studying other marketing campaigns, especially within your niche, and picking the common keywords.
Additionally, ensure that you don’t spam your campaign by using too many keywords. Find a balance for your SEO strategy to work.
Create a website
You need a website to host your content about the campaign. This is where you’ll need to add all the details about your product so that the audience and potential backers can see that your campaign is legit.
A website will boost your SEO strategy if you want to boost traffic to your campaign. Fortunately, it’s easy to set up a simple self-hosted WordPress site. You can customize it and add all the information your audience needs to know, making it easier for them to contribute.
Optimize your landing page with SEO
Your landing page is the first place your visitors see when they visit your site. Therefore, you need to optimize it for SEO to boost your Kickstarter campaign. Here are some of the ways to implement this.
Generate content with keyword focus in mind
Content is king! Ensure your content is relevant and engaging to boost your website rankings. Include keywords that will attract more backlinks and shares. Avoid stuffing these keywords to rank better on Google and other search engines.
Create clear CTAs
A call-to-action (CTA) directs your audience to your campaign. For instance, for your Kickstarter campaign, you can have a CTA with a link to your website or social media page. You can also add a link to your Kickbooster. Google will rank your site higher as you get more traffic.
Test your site speed
Statistics show that 53% of mobile site visits get abandoned if the pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. If you want your website visitors to stay on your page and read the content about your campaign, you need to optimize your site to load faster. Fortunately, there are tools that you can use, such as Semrush, to check your site speed.
Include meta descriptions
Meta descriptions let Google know what your page is about. Once the search engine reads this description, it can rank it better. Therefore, ensure that you add the focus keywords in your meta description.
Use descriptive URL slugs
The URL slug is also one of the indicators that Google uses to know what the page is about before ranking it. Add the focus keywords in the slug to boost your SEO rankings on the search results.
Index your page in Google Search Console
Adding your website to Google Search Console allows you to see the data on how your website is performing. You can evaluate your site by looking at the keyword rankings, organic search, and click-through rate. This information lets you view the poorly performing areas and make improvements.
Create social media profiles with backlinks relevant to your project
Your campaign should have a presence on social media platforms, especially Facebook, Instagram, and X. As you draft your social media posts, you can add backlinks leading back to your website or campaign on Kickstarter. These platforms will reach more people and create awareness about your campaign.
You can also use your pages to keep your audience updated about the project’s progress, which boosts credibility. For social media to be effective, you can also run sponsored ads that include your focus keywords. This will reach a bigger audience and drive more traffic to your project on Kickstarter.
Write about your Kickstarter in a blog
Guest blogging is ranked as one of the best inbound marketing strategies. To boost the visibility of your campaign, you can guest blog on other websites that are relevant to your product. For instance, if you are in the gaming business, you should find sites in the same niche to get in front of a new audience.
Find the websites with the highest referral traffic and pitch guest posts to them. Ensure you add a link to your Kickstarter campaign page to drive more traffic to the project. This boosts the visibility of your site to potential backers.
Invite guest bloggers and influencers
Hiring a crowdfunding agency is not always the right path for most businesses. You might not raise the money you need even after spending a lot of cash. Fortunately, there are other ways to highlight your campaign by inviting guest bloggers and influencers to collaborate.
Guest bloggers will help you boost the SEO for your Kickstarter campaign by spreading more information about your project. Once they write content for your site and share it on other platforms, you’ll have more visibility.
Alternatively, you can hire influencers to promote your brand. As you send them a pitch, include the story about the brand, what you hope to gain from the collaboration, and the offer they’ll receive in return. Influencer marketing is critical if you want to direct traffic to your campaign. Additionally, it’s less costly, making it ideal if you are a startup.
Post and cross post this content on your socials
Your social media platforms should help you promote the campaign. Your website and Kickstarter campaign content should also be posted on your social media pages. This strategy broadens your reach and allows you to reach more people. Create visuals for your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter pages to make them more appealing to the target audience.
Keep your backers frequently updated and engaged with posts
Your Kickstarter backers would love to know the progress of your project. For instance, if you are fundraising for a documentary, you need to provide details on how far the process has gone, such as when you start shooting or when you are done with the production.
You can share milestones on the website and social media as soon as you achieve them. This provides credibility for your business and shows you are using the money to implement the project. Once your audience trusts you, you can have other successful Kickstarter campaigns. As you expand, you can eventually turn the campaign into a successful eCommerce using ScaleBoom.
Create lots of shareable content
You need a lot of sharable content to boost SEO for your Kickstarter. This can be in the form of posters, artwork, short videos or images that include information about the campaign. You should also have links that your friends and family can share with other people to increase the visibility of your crowdfunding campaign.
Run targeted PPC ads and remarketing campaigns
A targeted PPC ad allows you to target a specific audience. This ad will be displayed on sites that your audience has visited in the past. One way to achieve this is by showing the ad to people who have expressed an interest in Kickstarter.
This strategy will remind your website visitors about your company’s Kickstarter campaign. To optimize the ads, use the relevant keywords just like in your website content and social media platforms.
Monitor your performance versus your goals and assess
The only way to know whether your campaign meets its goals is by looking at the performance. You need to invest in tools that can help you assess the traffic on your campaign and its sources. There are tools like Kicktraq that help you with this. Once you have the results, you can optimize your campaign much better.
Consider working with expert SEO crowdfunding consultants
If this is your first crowdfunding campaign, you don’t have to struggle alone. You can enlist the services of expert SEO crowdfunding consultants to guide you on how to optimize your content.
