Startup SEO: Best SEO Strategies for Startups

Oh, no doubt: Startup SEO is its own beast.

You’ve got no time, no team, and barely a budget, after all.

You also battle guys who've been at it for far longer than you. They have the authority, body of content, and darn frigging money that you don't.

But you still need traffic. And you need it to convert. FRIGGIN FAST.

The problem? Most SEO advice feels like it’s written for bloated teams with 18-month roadmaps. Not for you. After all, you don’t have the kind of time, budget, or patience they do.

That's why I wrote this guide.

I've been helping startups grow with SEO since 2014, and in this guide, I've packed everything I know about the stuff that works—the fastest, leanest, startup-tested SEO strategies. The ones that actually move the needle when you’re building product and traction at the same time.

So, let’s dive in.

Also, you don’t have the luxury of SEO managers, dedicated content teams, or long lead times.

You’re probably doing SEO between product standups and customer calls.

And this changes everything. You can’t follow the same advice you’ll find in enterprise SEO playbooks. You need strategies that are:

• Fast to implement (because you don’t have time)
• Low-lift (because your dev team’s already underwater)
• High-impact (because you need results, not vanity metrics)

In other words, startup SEO is tactical. Opportunistic. Scrappy. It’s about building authority while building product. Ranking while debugging. Writing while raising.

Which also means that there are certain things I need you to keep in mind when you're going through this guide.

SEO Strategy Is Not a Keyword List

Too many founders kick things off by opening a keyword tool, finding a bunch of semi-relevant phrases, and thinking, "Cool, strategy sorted."

It’s not.

It's not even a starting point of a startup SEO strategy.

It’s just a pile of words that roughly relate to your product category (or even not!) with no plan behind it.

Let me share an example. I was once approached by a startup, a Gmail plugin. They had a ton of content published already. Honestly, a couple of hundred of pages. Yet little results beyond that.

The reason - Well, the company simply researched every possible Gmail-related topic, and published content on that.

No regard as to whether a keyword or topic relates to their audience's pain points.

No consideration whether a topic can attract people looking for their solution.

Just a bunch of Gmail-related advice.

On the traffic level, it worked great. On the commercial end... not so much.

And in the end, Google hit them with the algorithm update because the content was just too generic, and offered little value to the company's target audience.

That's because the SEO strategy is far more than just a bunch of keywords you think will work.

(BTW, I am not making this statement just for the sake of it. Later in this guide, I will show you exactly how to develop a strategy that will connect you with the exact people searching for products like yours.)

A real startup SEO strategy answers four questions:

• What are we publishing?
• For whom?
• Why are we publishing it?
• What outcome are we expecting from it?

Keyword lists are useful—yes. But they’re just ingredients. A strategy is the recipe.

Here’s the difference:

• Keyword: "calendar tool for freelancers."
• Strategy: "Let’s write a teardown of how freelancers waste time managing projects—and show how our product solves it."

One is data. The other is a plan. Both are important, though.

And you need both to make SEO work for you.

So, as harsh as this might seem, a startup SEO strategy has to start with the real world:

• What questions are customers asking your support team?
• What’s getting mentioned in demos or trials?
• What terms are showing up in user research?

Those insights shape the content you create. Not the keyword volume or difficulty.

For example, if your tool integrates with Notion, your early SEO play might be:

• A guide to "how to use Notion with [your tool]"
• A landing page for "[your tool] + Notion integration"
• A tutorial for "Notion productivity stack"

Even if those topics get a handful of searches a month—doesn’t matter. If it’s relevant to your users, that’s the right place to start.

Build Content Around What You’re Building

Your SEO strategy should be rooted in the product you’re building.

But it's not about what the product does, of course.

That's important, too but what matters for your SEO is how it solves real problems—and how those solutions can translate into content your audience is already looking for.

After all, no one knows your product like you do. And no one can create more relevant, high-converting content than you—if you tie it to what you’re actually building.

In SEO, we call this approach product-led SEO.

Product-led SEO flips the typical was companies build their organic growth.

Instead of finding keywords and building content around them, you build content around the actual features, benefits, and use cases of your product—and then figure out what keywords those align with.

EXAMPLE: Let’s say you’ve just launched a time-blocking feature in your productivity app. Don’t go looking for a "time blocking tips" keyword with 2,400 monthly searches and try to write the same generic post as everyone else.

Instead, write:

• A teardown of how you designed the feature (great for credibility + internal links)
• A tutorial for "how to time-block your week"
• A use-case guide for "how freelancers can time-block using [Your Tool]"

This kind of content might not all go viral. But it:

• Solves actual user problems
• Targets people who are already in your ecosystem (or close)
• Has crazy-high conversion potential
• Helps train AI models about your startup

Why does this work?

Because people are searching for very specific things.

With product-led content, you gain an incredible advantage: specificity.

The more closely your content aligns with your product’s capabilities and your user’s pain points, the more it stands out—both to search engines and users.

So your job is to:

• Look at what you're building (features, use cases, integrations)
• Map content ideas to it (tutorials, comparison pages, guides, teardowns)
• Optimize lightly around what real users might search for

Do that consistently, and your SEO will work harder than most startup teams ever manage to make it.

Let me show you how to do it. Step-by-step.

1. Own Branded Search Before Someone Else Does

If someone Googles your product name—or even your general category—you should be the one deciding what they see first.

And yet, most early-stage startups don’t.

They wait.

They focus on generic keywords or top-of-the-funnel topics.

They wait until someone else starts ranking for branded commercial queries—things like '[Your Tool] alternatives', '[Your Tool] pricing', or '[Your Tool] reviews'...

Let me show you what I mean.

Hotjar doesn't even appear in the first page for keywords like "Hotjar alternatives."

My client, Refiner, on the other hand, completely controls conversations around alternatives to their product.

This means that they engage with anyone who's, perhaps, considering using their product but are still on the fence.

And with this page, Refiner can once again, reiterate their product's best selling points, key features, and so on, and convince the person that the product might in fact be the best choice for them.

So, in your startup's SEO strategy, need to cover your bases and do it first thing.

That means:

• A clear, optimized homepage that ranks for your product name
• A “[Product] + use case” page for every major problem you solve
• A “[Product] + integration” page for every tool you connect with
• A “[Product] vs Competitor” page for each real alternative you’re hearing about in sales calls or onboarding
• A “[Product] pricing” page—even if you already mention it on your homepage

These aren’t just checkbox pages or filler content. These are defensive assets that:

• Help you control your brand narrative
• Reduce the chance someone clicks on a competitor or aggregator instead
• Give your users the clarity they’re looking for before they hit signup

If you don’t build these pages, someone else will. Sites like G2 or Capterra, forum threads on Reddit or StackOverflow, blog posts from niche reviewers, or even AI-generated summaries in search results—these are all places where users might land if your branded content doesn’t exist.

You don’t need these pages to outrank everyone else in the world. But you do need to make sure that Google has a relevant, high-quality page from you to show when someone searches for a commercial query that includes your brand. Otherwise, a competitor, aggregator, or third-party reviewer might own that moment—and the click.

Because if your own content doesn’t show up when people are looking for your product? That’s not just bad SEO. That’s a growth leak.

2. Do Things That Don’t Scale (Yet Rank)

Do you know what is one of the most frigging irritating SEO myths out there?

It's that only high-volume keywords are worth targeting. That if something gets 10 searches a month, it’s not worth your time.

Honestly, that mindset is poison for startups.

Because in the early days, doing unscalable SEO is often your most scalable growth move.

You’re not chasing scale. You’re chasing traction—and traction often hides in places the big players ignore.

Let’s say your tool integrates with a niche platform that doesn’t even show up in Ahrefs. Nobody’s written about that combo. No one’s competing for that keyword.

Perfect. That’s your opportunity.

Write the guide. Make the integration page. Record the demo. Even if it only gets 5 visits a month—that’s 5 high-intent people no one else is serving. That’s where early wins live.

This kind of low-volume, high-specificity content:

• Gets ranking fast
• Doe so with little to no backlink effort
• Converts better than broad, generic content

Here’s what that might look like:

• A Zapier automation tutorial that solves one specific user’s request
• A feature walkthrough answering a support ticket
• A landing page for your Airtable + API + your-tool hack that only your customers care about

Each one of these feels like a one-off. And that’s the point.

Individually, they’re not scalable. But stacked over time? They build topical authority. They cover long-tail search demand. They help Google understand what you do and who you serve.

And better yet—they convert.

At this stage, you’re not HubSpot. You’re not writing “What is CRM?” to capture awareness. You’re writing “How to sync calendar invites to [Your Tool] using Cron and Google Calendar” because the person searching that is seconds away from needing what you built.

That’s not scale. That’s precision.

So don’t get stuck chasing what’s popular. Go after what’s useful. The weird, specific, low-volume stuff. The blog post that helps ten people—and gets three of them to sign up.

That’s SEO that builds traction. And that’s the game you’re playing right now.

3. Don’t Overthink Technical SEO

In startup SEO, technical SEO, probably, gets the most airtime.

Core Web Vitals, crawl budgets, structured data, JavaScript rendering... it sounds important. It also ties in with what you might know most - you know, the technical stuff, code, servers, and the shebang.

But the thing is, if you’re a startup with a relatively small site—under a few hundred pages—technical SEO is unlikely to be what’s holding you back.

After all, most startup websites don’t have major technical issues. You’re not running a 20-year-old CMS. You’re probably on Webflow, WordPress, or some custom setup that’s modern and clean.

You don't have that many pages either.

And there isn't anything else that could go wrong on the technical side.

That said, there are certain elements of technical SEO that you should pay attention to:

• Site speed: Use tools like PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse. Get your site loading fast, especially on mobile. Compress images. Minify assets. Use a CDN.
• Mobile-friendliness: This is non-negotiable. Make sure everything works on a phone.
• Proper indexing: Check your robots.txt, noindex tags, and sitemap. Google should be able to find and crawl your pages.
• Clean URLs: Use short, readable slugs. Avoid query strings where possible. Stick to lowercase, hyphenated formats.
• Internal links: Help search engines (and users) navigate your content. Don’t orphan key pages.

That’s it.

Honestly, nail those basics and move on. Don’t get stuck chasing every warning in your SEO audit tool.

4. Speed Beats Perfection

Your startup doesn't need perfectly polished content. You need content that’s out in the world, working for you.

One of the most dangerous habits of early-stage startups is treating content like a product launch. Waiting until every word is just right. Delaying until the images pop. Holding off because they’re not 100% sure about the CTA.

That mindset kills momentum. And in startup SEO, momentum is everything.

After all, you’re not writing for a Pulitzer.

You’re writing to be found.

The faster your page goes live, the faster Google can crawl, index, and start ranking it. And the sooner users can give you feedback, link to it, or share it with someone else.

Here’s the startup approach:

• Publish when it’s 70% ready.
• Improve it based on what happens next.

Let’s say you’ve written a comparison page: “[Your Tool] vs [Competitor].” It’s short. Maybe a bit rough. No visuals yet. But the key points are there.

Ship it.

A week later, you notice people are bouncing fast. So you add feature screenshots. Two weeks in, it hits position #12. Now you expand the section on pricing and add testimonials. A month later? Page one.

That’s how SEO works when you publish fast and iterate.

Meanwhile, your competitor is still rewriting their intro.

Remember, in SEO, perfection is nice. Progress is better.

You’ll always be able to refine, optimize, and upgrade later. What you won’t get back is the time lost waiting for something to be flawless.

So hit publish. Let it breathe. Then make it better.

5. You don't need that many tools

This is something that drives me nuts every time: Founders getting bogged with which tool to use. Or which tool would get them to results faster. Or better yet, which tool would do the work for them.

Ugh!

(BTW, the answer to that last question is none!)

And I get it. There are so many (far too many, I'd say,) SEO tools out there.

Keyword research tools. Clustering tools. AI analysis tools. Those "magical" AI writing tools that promise miracles and more.

But the reality is that you don't need the majority of them.

In fact, to work on your startup SEO, you need just three tools:

Google Search Console

 The first tool you absolutely need is Google Search Console (GSC).

GSC is a free resource provided by Google that gives you access to all the SEO related data that the search engine has about your website. Basically, with GSC, you can see your website through Google's eyes

You can see all the topics, all the keywords, etc. that attract traffic or impressions or clicks to your side. You can also learn about your pages in Google's index, which pages have been indexed, which haven't, which maybe have been indexed long time ago and maybe need to be recalled, and more.

GSC is also a place where Google will send any information about any manual actions against your site. This doesn't happen very often, but just in case, it's there.

So, overall, an absolutely must have resource.

An SEO Platform

The second tool you absolutely must have is an SEO platform.

SEO platform is the type of a all-in-one SEO tool that comprises various capabilities that allow you to perform different SEO actions.

I know it's kind of mouthful, blah, blah, blah, but this is really what it is. It's, it's one tool that allows you to monitor your rankings, , conduct keyword research, analyze your links, conduct competitive analysis, and  take tens and tens of other SEO actions to build and improve your SEO strategy.

The two most known SEO platforms are Ahrefs and SEMrush.

A website analytics tool

Website analytics tool is basically a tool that tracks your traffic.

Historically, we've been using Google Analytics for this, but I don't recommend it and pardon of my French, the tool is absolutely rubbish.

It's over bloated, there are far too many features to make any sense of it. And don't get me get started on the user experience...

Ugh...

But, there are other website analytics tools that are much better, more lightweight. They don't clog your website. They deliver data in a very clean format... And they track what you need to track - traffic per channel, they'll track top pages, et cetera. You can set up goals, you can set up funnels, to track if, if you want to track, , how traffic progresses to specific funnels , or throughout your site, et cetera.

They're very straightforward, relatively cheap, probably from 10 to $20 a month depending on the package, depending on the tool, .

Do I really need SEO if I’m just starting out?

Yes—especially if you care about sustainable growth. Early SEO work compounds. Even a few well-targeted pages can bring in traffic (and signups) for years.

How long do I have to work on startup SEO until I see results?

For most startups, expect 6-12 months for pages to start ranking and driving meaningful traffic. But with low-competition, high-intent keywords, you can get some early wins quicker.

What matters more—content or backlinks?

Content, at first. Backlinks help, but great content that solves real problems often earns links naturally. Focus on being genuinely useful.

Should I go after long-tail keywords?

Absolutely. That’s where early traction is. Long-tail terms are less competitive, more specific, and more likely to convert.

Can I do SEO myself? Or should I hire someone?

You can absolutely do it yourself, especially in the early stages. Later, bring in help to scale—but you don’t need a consultant to get started.

How do I know if my SEO is working?

Initially, this can be challenging, since you might not be getting many clicks, etc. I'd recommend start with tracking impressions. Growth in impressions will signify a growth of search authority. Eventually, your site will start ranking well and attracting clicks, and these would be the two metrics to track.    On top of that—track signups and conversions. Traffic is nice. Revenue is better.