SEO for Startups – Why, How, and Tips

The term SEO for startups is interesting, as it implies that SEO is necessary for startups to succeed. And the truth is, SEO for startups is not necessarily an important factor. And we’ve seen quite a few SEO startup guides which contain old, outdated, and overly basic tips – we’ll even show you here, here, and here.

Due to the lack of a solid SEO guide for startups, we set out to create this page, which we will constantly update with the latest SEO tips for startup companies to employ. (A bit about us: we are SEO experts who launched this awesome interviews with startup founders site, so we’ve got plenty to say on the matter 🙂

9 Questions for SEO that Every Startup Company Needs to Ask:

1. Does your startup need SEO?
2. What is the timeline for results and how quickly can you expect success?
3. How much should you be spending on SEO?
4. What are the most basic SEO best practices for a startup company which has plans to become a long term brand?
5. Can you improve your organic rankings in just 1 day?
6. How can you expand your startup brand’s web visibility with keyword research and content relatively quickly?
7. What exactly is top of the funnel lead acquisition for a startup with no budget?
8. How can you successfully mesh social media, influencer campaigns, alongside paid ads and SEO?
9. How can I spot a shady SEO agency trying to take advantage of a newbie startup company?

Does your startup company really need SEO in 2024?

This is the first question which we internally discuss when clients approach us about “getting some SEO” for their fledgling startup companies. Especially when they have a lean budget! The reason we take this question seriously is because there would be nothing worse than taking on a client who doesn’t really need any SEO, and after 3 months the client will angrily ask us why we aren’t bringing them leads. We try to avoid such situations 🙂

If you’re a newcomer to SEO, you’re probably wondering, “Well, what sort of website doesn’t need SEO?”, and the answer is simple. Many startups are flash in the pan and need one or two solid PR campaigns to get the ball rolling. They simply need advertising to get traffic or leads, as well as awareness, and that’s it. If they are pushing an app, then they need App Store Optimization, which is much more fishy than SEO ever was.

Many startup companies don’t really have a keyword they want to rank for. In fact, many startups offer a product or service which didn’t really exist 1 year ago – this means that no one is searching in Google for the very thing they are offering! This makes SEO mostly useless for them (granted, it helps for an SEO to give their website a once over so that in the future when they do need SEO, the inevitable SEO mistakes committed in the interim aren’t too bad and are easily fixable).

And because many startups need to educate the masses, this means they need PR and advertising WAYYYY before SEO should enter the equation. As for what kind of PR they need? Well, we also don’t recommend paying $5000 for a Tech Crunch feature. That is not real PR.

TLDR for Does Your Startup Company Really Need SEO:

• Most startups don’t need SEO at first, rather a lean PR burst or paid ads
• If your ideal user base isn’t using Google to search for you product because your product/service doesn’t exist, then you will need to educate the masses via PR and ads
• If you have a budget and expect your company to be around for a long time, then it’s worth committing to basic SEO best practices to save your company time and money down the line

What is the timeline for results and how quickly can your startup expect SEO success?

Of course, there is no stock answer to this question. But the short answer is: a long time. Usually 6 months to see decent results.

The biggest sign of an SEO fraud or huckster is one who promises you fast results, ESPECIALLY if you are a brand new website. There is a thing in SEO often referred to as the Google Sandbox, which basically says that Google will artificially hold back the organic growth of a website by a few months. Reasons behind this are unclear, but there is speculation that it is due to Google wanting a good user experience for website visitors, and a brand new website will be more unfinished and have less content than your average, aged website.

However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t see results quickly, on a certain scale, for a brand new site. In fact, there are basic elements such as your brand name, which you want to rank for quickly, and ahead of your social accounts, within 2-3 weeks.

Although this is an impossible task, for the sake of a visual we will add a rough, generic timeline for what a basic, brand new, startup website would look like in terms of SEO results:

• Day 1: Create website, social profiles
• Day 5-14: Begin to see impressions in Search Console, but no rankings or visitors
• Day 14-21: Brand name ranks top 5, and visitors begin to trickle in
• Day 21-30: Website ranks #1 for brand name, and there is at least 1 organic visitor a day
• Day 30-60: Website ranks top 20 for homepage title tag (more on that below), and website content brings in steady flow of visitors, with 100’s of impressions per week
• Day 60-180: Assuming links are built, and content is updated 3x a week, a website will begin to see 500-2000 visitors a month, which tens of thousands of impressions. There is now enough data to make serious tweaks in regard to on-site optimization.
• Day 180-360: Organic traffic can explode beyond 2000 visitors a month, and your homepage and main category pages will rank top 10 across Google (depending on the keyword difficulty, of course).
• Day 365: Send a bottle of champagne to your SEO people

How much should you be spending on SEO for your startup company?

The question of how much of a startup company’s budget should be allocated toward SEO is a tricky one. First off, it depends on how well funded the startup is, and can fall into two categories:

1. Did your startup receive funding yet? If so, how much was allocated toward the marketing budget?
2. Are you a bootstrapped startup with just 1-2 employees?
3. Are your investors breathing down your neck?

If you are flush with funding, then let’s talk numbers. Say you have a $2k a month marketing budget, which is on top of your hypothetical salary. We would break it down to the following:

• Social Media: in house
• Paid Ad and Social Ads: $500
• SEO: $500
• Content: in house or AI
• PR: $1000

Yep, you read that correctly. We are SEO experts and we think that a startup would benefit more from PR than from SEO services. This is because SEO is worthless if no one finds out about your startup. There is a clock ticking aspect to a startup company. You can’t be a startup forever, right? Eventually, if your startup service or product does not succeed, then there won’t be a company anymore.

Sure, this logic can apply to many small businesses, but one cannot deny the ephemeral nature to startup companies. What good is SEO if your amazing startup remains a secret.

However, a $2000/mo marketing budget is not enough. SEO is neglected by marketing mathematicians and influencer noisemakers as slow or hard to prove. And those people will fail. SEO is the marketing turtle. Slow, steady, and a winner. And in the age of AI in 2024 and beyond, SEO is more crucial than ever. Influencer money or redundant paid campaigns will bring you some shiny numbers, only to disappear overnight. Pay for play in those worlds. They are the rabbit. And the turtle always wins.

PR vs. SEO for startups

This battle which we just touched upon in the previous paragraph is a delicate one, and it all depends on whether your startup company’s services or product is being searched for in Google or needs some ol’ fashioned public relations in order to be found. In short, are people already searching for it, or do they need to be educated.

Now, occasionally, there may be a brand new service that users are already searching in Google for, such as “Uber for lawyers“. Uber is an extremely new concept that did not exist 3 years ago, but the Uber for X term has entered our vernacular and people are searching for it. This is an example of a startup service that although people don’t really know about, is being searched for, and serves as a case where SEO would indeed be beneficial.

But what about a product that people don’t know exists? Did you invent a bluetooth phone that works in the shower? Well, before we spend our money on PR, it would make sense to check out the search volume for this product. This can be done with Google AdWords, and it turns out there is no search volume for this product. THIS is the perfect situation to save your SEO money and burn through PR services.

Okay, well how about just a little SEO?

Okay fine, you can do a little SEO. The trick here is that even if your product falls under the category of education-required, and isn’t being searched for in Google, there are still some basic SEO aspects which can be taken care of, on a very easy to implement level so that you don’t even need to spend any money on SEO for your startup company.

At the very very least, it is important for your website to be found when people search for your company name in Google. This means 2 things:

1. Register your startup with social profiles and make sure that each social profile (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc) all link back to the homepage of your website.
2. Make sure that your startup website has a homepage title tag which says the brand name, and the main keyword of what your service or product is. This is because when people search for your keyword, you want to be found in Google. (Granted, it is possible that no one is searching for your keyword because it is so new, but regardless, they might search for it one day).

Paid ads vs SEO for Startup Companies

Here is another question we often get: Should we pay for SEO services for our startup company, or should we just dump that money into paid ads, which generally fall under Google AdWords and Facebook advertising (don’t forget LinkedIn and Twitter ads, which are considered to be super expensive, and wasteful, respectively).

The truth is, as we outlined above, you never want to ignore SEO, which is why we listed those 2 basic and super easy SEO tips that every startup company should execute. Beyond that, however, paid ads can indeed go a long way (so long as you have the dollars for it).

Again, going back to the notion of whether a startup product or service requires education, can impact the decision to spend money on paid ads. Paid ads is more similar to SEO in the sense that it kind of requires users to already be searching for it (Google AdWords). However, there are other social ads which can you let you play the PR angle and show your service to users who fit a particular demographic (Facebook) which does not require a user to already be searching for a keyword which they may never have thought to look for.

That is why paid ads touches on both PR and SEO for startups: Google AdWords is more similar to SEO as it pertains to the search ecosystem and is a question of ‘do users know about the product or service that we are selling and are therefore searching in Google (or even Amazon) for it?’. OR the question becomes ‘do users have no idea about our product or service, however, we think we know who the types of people are who would use our product, and then we spend money on Facebook ads to target these specific users’.

3 Advanced SEO strategies for Startups:

If you’ve made it this far in this SEO for startups resource article, then it’s time to get advanced, and talk about how you can really stretch the organic presence of your startup company with a couple of advanced SEO strategies and tips for startups.

Make sure you get links. The reason why brand new websites take forever to rank for competitive keywords in Google is because they don’t have any links pointing to them. Google weighs the strength of websites via the number and quality of links pointing to them. (The reason why Google was able to easily defeat the former search engine giants such as Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Dogpile, Excite, and many others, is due to this clever heuristic of essentially counting inbound links and also weighing their quality).

As it pertains to brand new websites, ie startups, it can be a difficult climb. But because PR is the name of the game when it comes to product or service based startups, you can get coverage of your startups, then the coverage will invariably include links to your startup website, which in turn boosts the strength of your website, thereby allowing you to rank for more keywords. Remember, this only really matters if your product or service is actually a thing that people know about.

No Budget? No Problem

You might be concerned if you are a bootstrapped startup founder, wondering where in the world will you get funding for your digital marketing. Paid ads, PR, social media, and many core SEO services are hard to come by without a real budget. Not to worry – there is one core option that you have, and it pertains to a core tenet of SEO strategies across all agencies: content is king.

Content Marketing

This is the way to get ahead of the pack in terms of organic strategy. Crank out content. But not just any content – crank out relevant content.

Don’t be afraid to tackle big industry relevant content questions with 1000 word blog posts or resource pages. Even more than 1000 words works – often times it’s the scrappy and smaller, bootstrapped web pages which have much more content and can therefore outrank bigger sites. And with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude2, Perplexity and more it is easier than ever to produce content! We’re going to outline a bit more granularly on how you can craft and crank out SEO best practice content:

Startup SEO Content Strategy: Pillar Pages & Peripheral Content Through Internal Linking

If the above header is a mouthful, that’s a good thing. When it comes to SEO power emanating from content, being concise or terse is not the name of the game. The more words the better (assuming it is not fluff).

Let’s take your homepage for example – you probably have a target keyword that your homepage is targeting. What you’ll need is to target this keyword with strategic interlinking by way of related content. So let’s say your target keyword for your homepage is “Startup marketing”. In addition to basic on page optimization, you will need to link to your homepage using that exact anchor text, elsewhere on your site.

But instead of random internal linking, the way most other sites seem to do, you’ll go ahead and craft pillar pages and peripherally related content pages, whose sole purpose is to link to your homepage. In this case, you will go ahead and create some big pillar pages (at least 1000 words each), of which you will write about various startup marketing concepts. Then you’ll go ahead and create a few 500 word blog posts, all of which are somewhat or peripherally related marketing concepts within the world of startups.

Make sure to link from the pillar pages to your homepage. And from each perihperally related blog post, make sure to link both to your pillar pages and to your homepage. What this does is it creates contextual relevancy and thereby significantly boosts the power of your interlinking. And because you have used aggressive, targetted anchor text, your homepage gets an even stronger signal. We actually used this exact strategy for this Startups #nofilter website, after we saw a drop in the late summer. Here is what happened after we created 2 pillar pages and 2 blog posts, all created for the sole purpose of boosting the homepage:

What ended up happening is that after we published these new pages on October 19th, we saw a dramatic, site-wide increase that began to manifest on October 20th. This is all because of our strategic, content-based interlinking.

Bonus: 10 Steps to Master SEO for Startups in 2024 and Beyond

1. Understand SEO Fundamentals:
   • Learn the basics of SEO, including on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
2. Identify Your Target Audience:
   • Research and define your target audience to tailor your SEO strategy.
3. Conduct Keyword Research:
   • Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords.
4. Optimize Your Website:
   • Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, fast, and secure.
5. Create High-Quality Content:
   • Produce valuable, engaging, and keyword-rich content regularly.
6. Build Backlinks:
   • Develop a strategy for acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sites.
7. Leverage Local SEO:
   • Optimize for local search by claiming your Google My Business listing and gathering reviews.
8. Utilize Social Media:
   • Promote your content and engage with your audience on social media platforms.
9. Monitor and Analyze Performance:
   • Use tools like Google Analytics to track your SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions.
10. Stay Updated with SEO Trends:
    • Keep up with the latest SEO trends and algorithm updates to stay ahead of the competition.

Will AI Chatbots Hurt SEO for Startup Companies?

AI has the potential to both help and hurt SEO for startups, if we are being honest. On one hand, AI-driven tools can significantly enhance SEO efforts by automating keyword research, content optimization, and data analysis. These tools can help startups identify trends, understand user behavior, and create more targeted content, ultimately improving their search rankings. AI can also streamline technical SEO tasks, such as website audits and performance monitoring, allowing startups to focus more on strategy and creativity.

On the other hand, AI can present challenges for SEO. As AI technology becomes more sophisticated, search engines are getting better at understanding and ranking content! This means that traditional SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, are becoming less effective. (But we DON’T recommend that anyway).

Startups may find it harder to compete with larger companies that have more resources to invest in advanced AI-powered SEO strategies. Additionally, the increasing use of AI-generated content can lead to oversaturation of generic content, making it more difficult for startups to stand out and attract organic traffic. Additionally, 47% of SEO professionals identified adapting to AI advancements as one of the biggest challenges in 2023​ (All in One SEO)​​ (Semrush).