SEO for Startups: Essential SEO Tips to Success

In this blog, I will try to share my experience with SEO and startups.

I was able to scale organic traffic to startups by more than 1500% in two years – from 5000 monthly sessions to 100K+ per month.

Does SEO still work? Or it would be best if you solely focused on Facebook and Google ads.

Still, SEO has the highest ROI among all inbound marketing channels.

Identify if SEO is a fit for your startup

The hard truth is, that SEO isn’t always a great fit for startups.

Important to know that SEO might not work on all occasions. These days, it is a pretty competitive area, which might require a lot of resources and time. So, it makes sense to clarify SEO expectations before going into a severe SEO campaign or hiring an expensive SEO agency.

For example, if your startup is in a super early stage and aims to get the first 10-50 customers ASAP. And SEO might take time to kick in – 6-8 months. In this case, maybe it’s better to go with Google or Facebook ads.

Another example is, when you are just in a super competitive SEO niche, with lots of ranking content for the whole range of keywords. Over-ranking your competitors will require considerable investments in link-building and fantastic content. 

Overall, I think SEO is an excellent choice for startups right before or after the first significant investment when there is a more apparent product-market fit and at least some stability ahead, required for the middle and long-term marketing strategy, such as SEO.

However, I recommend starting blogging and content marketing campaigns as early as possible.

Design and execute SEO strategy

My SEO strategy for startups = tech setup + 3 SEO whales.

  1. Tech SEO setup for startups

You should always start from tech setup.

For many startups, just a WordPress site is ok, and the product is hosted on a separate subdomain. Another popular web setup is the custom-built website (e.g., some JavaScript or PHP frameworks) + WordPress blog.

Essential technical checklist for startup SEO:

  • Good hosting
  • Install CMS (WordPress would be my choice)
  • SEO plugins (Yoast)
  • Search Console account
  • Mobile view
  • Caching
  • Optimized images
  • CDN
  • AMP

Your blog should be the core of your startup SEO. If you are a startup serious about SEO, you should definitely have a blog. 

TIP: host your blog under a subfolder, not a subdomain—E.g., awesome.site/blog, not blog.awesome.site.

3 SEO whales: keywords, content, and backlinks

Search engine optimization is one of the essential aspects of digital marketing. Investing in SEO can be an excellent idea for startup companies because it helps boost their online presence and drive more traffic to their website using high search engine rankings. However, SEO can be complicated if you don’t know where and how to start.  

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In that case, having a strategy would make great sense for your SEO efforts. For example, investing in a good SaaS SEO strategy is essential to start a SaaS business. It refers to choosing keywords relevant to your product and creating and optimizing website content to rank highly on major search engines.  Because of this, you should develop an SEO strategy so you can streamline your marketing efforts to achieve the best possible results you’re looking for.

For instance, in my experience, the three most important areas for SEO strategy and scaling your organic traffic are:

  1. Keywords research
  2. Content (+ on-page SEO), based on this research
  3. Backlinks pointing to the content

If you remove one of these elements, your SEO strategy might not work or will not work at total capacity.

Hence, if you want to know how to create a good SEO strategy, you can check some reliable online resources which provide valuable information and insights about keywords, content creation, and link building.  

On the other hand, if you need professional assistance, you can hire a reliable SEO agency to help your startup with its SEO efforts.

Keywords

Essentially, keywords play a crucial role in the success of your search engine optimization efforts. They’re used to help website content drive more organic and relevant search traffic. Since users use them when searching for specific information, you should invest in proper keyword research.  

Remember, optimized, and researched keywords can help connect your website to your target audience. So, to get started, identify top keywords using many keyword tools or SEO competitors’ research.

You can start with Google suggest or “Related search” at the bottom of SERP.

google autocomplete

There is also a free keyword tool in Google ads (you don’t need to run Google ads to access it).

free keyword research tool

Also another option – is to “steal” keyword and content ideas from competing startups. This might work well, as you can find a lot of niche, long-tail keywords for which it is much easier to rank.

You can do this with Ahrefs or Semrush.

Here is an overview of the top organic keywords for Neil Patel’s site.

organic keywords list example

Amazing content

Create amazing, comprehensive content which gives the ultimate answer to the above keywords or search queries.

Of course, your content should be original and non-plagiarized. If you outsource your content (a common thing for startups) – always check it for plagiarism.

Focus on long-form content – at least 1500+ words. Ideally, you should aim in the 2000-2400 range. This content tends to perform better in Google searches.

A lot of startups make the mistake of spamming with 500-word articles. Don’t go that route. It doesn’t work for SEO – you will waste time and resources. Instead, create a few high-quality long reads which cover all aspects of a specific topic.

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Link to other relevant articles. Google should see your blogs as a “topic octopus,” which covers all aspects of a niche.

Add visuals, infographics, quotes, expert opinions, videos, gifs, podcasts – anything which can make your content stand out from hundreds of other articles.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO also matters a lot. You need to organize your content in a way that’s understandable to Google.

For example, you selected a focus keyword: “chocolate doughnuts.” Google bots should clearly understand that your content is about this keyword.

Include your focus keyword in the following:

  • Meta tags (Title and meta description)
  • Headings
  • Alt tags
  • First paragraph
  • Anchor tags

Also, think of the following:

  • Keyword density
  • Content length (at least 300-500 words)
  • Adding images
  • Internal links (pointing to other related articles)
  • Easiness to read

You can check all of that with the free Yoast WordPress plugin. If you don’t use WordPress, there is also a free Yoast real-time tool.

seo for startups yoast wordpress plugin

You enter your focus keyword, and the tool will present some suggestions.

Link building

Last but not least, actively build backlinks to that content.

The more high-quality backlinks – the better.

This step is often either skipped or misunderstood by many startup content teams. A lot of them consider link building spammy, and not a helpful activity.

High-quality link building is a “secret sauce” of SEO, which gives you an advantage over your competitors. If you figure it out – you will rank higher than they in Google.

Here are some ways to get high-quality backlinks:

  • Outreach
  • Guest posting
  • PR campaign
  • Listings in business directories, local pages
  • Engaging with the community (forums, other blogs’ comments, subreddits)
  • Answering questions on Quora
  • Backlinks from your customers
  • Backlinks ideas from your competitors

Some startups are fortunate: because of the great product, they get a lot of coverage in top technical publishers – TechCrunch, TheVerge, Mashable, and so on – with top-tier backlinks. If you combine that strong domain with the blog – you will get a lot of traffic! So, again, start a startup blog. 🙂

You can also look at your competitors’ backlink profiles for other backlink ideas.

Use Ahrefs.

For example, here is a backlink profile of Backlinko – one of the top SEO blogs.

seo for startups keyword research

I can see some backlinks from guest posts, forums, and social media, so I will try to publish my site there.

Look at your competitors.

Very often, in startup SEO, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

There are plenty of similar companies in your niche already with similar blogs.

It can be an SEO goldmine, especially if you have little SEO experience or resources.

From competitors, you can learn:

  • top searched content (great for your topics)
  • most shared content
  • their backlinks (it is a fantastic link-building technique)
  • content-type and structure
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For example, you can learn your competitors’ content and make a better version of it, and there is a high chance it will perform great as well.

Again, here is a screenshot of the most shared content from Backlinko (done with the Ahrefs tool). Some articles get 2-7K social media shares! Try to create something similar, and your content might take off as well.

seo for startups: ahref screenshot 1

And here is an overview of top blogs by organic search.

These are great topic ideas for your blogs as well.

seo for startups: ahref screenshot 2

Tracking SEO campaigns

In a startup world, it is super important to have all metrics or something to present to investors.

There are more than 200 SEO ranking factors. How to identify the most important ones? And if you hired an expensive marketing agency, how to know you are not throwing money out of the window?

So, here are the leading SEO KPIs for startups:

  • Organic traffic
  • Nr of conversions from organic traffic
  • Nr of ranking keywords in the top 100 Google
  • Nr of referring domains
  • Your domain authority
  • Page speed

The first two are the most important ones. Many founders don’t care about SEO details, such as link building or, e.g., schema markup. You should focus on “conversions (leads, orders, trials) coming from Google.”

Don’t get distracted by other things. Just put all your effort into growing organic traffic and conversions from that traffic.

SEO for B2B and B2C startups

SEO for B2B and B2C products can be totally different.

For B2C sites, SEO is much more straightforward.

Imagine you created a hotel booking platform. For SEO, you will need to add more copy for every hotel listing page and then build backlinks to these pages. There are thousands of hotels, so you have thousands of indexable opportunities.

People search in Google – “book hotel X in city X” -> land on page -> convert.

Easy.

For B2B – e.g., you built a project management software – there aren’t as many landing page opportunities as with B2C.

So, SEO is trickier here – you need to invest a lot of effort in your blog and sales-oriented content.

Ranking for “best project management software” might be challenging.

So, people search for “productivity tips” -> land on your blog about increasing productivity -> link to project management software landing page -> conversion. 

So, it would be best to learn how to create sales-oriented and ranking content.

Keep these differences in mind while creating your SEO for startups strategy.

That’s about it for this blog. For a start.

Of course, there are many other SEO techniques for startups, but it will probably require a book. 🙂

Author bio

Andrew Gor – SEO fanatic with 10+ years of experience. He focuses on keyword research, rank tracking, and tech SEO hacks. Check out his SEO blog – Online Hikes, and an inspirational site for entrepreneurs – Museuly.

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