SEO for (Busy) Founders
Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2024 4:32 am
If you’re a founder who knows that SEO matters, but doesn’t know where to start, check out this one-page primer.
Thanks to the following founders for sharing feedback on this guide:
Juan Bello, Porter
Liam Jones, Pilla
Yanan He, stealth startup
Aaron Beashel, Attribute
Jaroslav Filak, ExpenseMonkey
Sidenote. I’m australia mobile phone number writing this based on my experience helping startups from pre-seed to post-IPO with their search strategy. I also taught some of these ideas as part of the a16z Marketing Counsel Series.
What SEO does
You already know that you need SEO, but it’s worth reiterating the benefits. SEO can help you:
Show up when people search for your company name.
Appear when people search for problems that your product can solve.
Find the exact language people use to describe your product (and quantify the demand for it).
Siphon users away from your competitors.
Create predictable customer acquisition and reduce your customer acquisition costs.
Build a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that makes it difficult for other companies to compete with you.
When to invest in SEO
Some startups use SEO as their primary acquisition channel from day one. For these companies, SEO only makes sense if you…
Understand your target customer. Effective SEO depends on a basic understanding of your target customers’ problems and pain points. If you don’t have a handful of customers who are paying (and sticking around), it’s hard to make SEO work.
Know how your customers buy. SEO is useful for many types of products, but not all—some buying processes happen almost entirely outside of organic search (not many seven-figure hotel flooring deals start from Google searches for “carpet for high-traffic areas”).
Can afford to commit for the long term. SEO is a long-term play, requiring months to years of sustained effort to get best-in-class results.
For most companies, SEO is a channel for scaling growth, not achieving product/market fit. It’s a way to add fuel to your fire, not start the fire.
It makes sense to invest more heavily in SEO when you want to…
Diversify your acquisition channels. Most startups invest in SEO when outbound or paid advertising is starting to get expensive and generate diminishing returns.
Reduce CAC. It’s one of the only truly compounding growth channels: money spent today on SEO can generate better and better returns in the future, as your pages rank and generate traffic for years to come. This is particularly crucial for freemium business as it helps offset the negative effect of churn rates.
Make life harder for your competitors. SEO is increasingly zero-sum: a handful of brands get most of the clicks for a given keyword. It’s good for you to be one of those brands, and bad for your competitors.
How SEO works
There are three pillars of SEO:
Content: the pages you create, including articles, tools, and landing pages.
Links: backlinks from other websites back to yours.
Technical: ensuring that there are no technical problems limiting your ability to appear in search engines.
They all matter, but to get started, I recommend prioritizing like this:
1. Content
Content matters the most. The more search-optimized content you create, the more chances you create for Google to show your company to relevant people. Content is both your biggest growth lever and your greatest bottleneck.
Great content can earn great links, almost passively. Inversely, it’s very hard to earn links without great content. Content can help explain the benefits of your product, and nudge people towards a purchase. Every new content page you create provides another “doorway” from the wilds of the internet into your website.
Further reading
SEO Content: The Beginner’s Guide
2. Links
Links play a big role in SEO. Google and other search engines use links as a vouch of confidence for your site (Google’s system is known as PageRank). Sites with more, higher-quality links, generally rank better in search.
As a general rule, links that are easy to get (like adding your website to a free startup directory) will have less of an impact than links that are difficult to get (like a relevant product mention in a well-respected industry blog).
There are exceptions to these rules, but generally speaking, you want to build links:
On websites which are relevant to your business
With descriptive anchor text (your brand name or company description, not “click here”)
That are dofollow
Further reading
Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide
3. Technical
No amount of content or links will help if Google’s crawlers can’t visit your pages or your website is hidden from search.
For most new or small websites, technical SEO is not a problem. Most popular CMSs (like WordPress, Wix, or Webflow) have decent technical SEO out of the box. This might not be the case if you’re running a custom CMS and compiling a bunch of static pages.
Think of technical SEO as removing barriers to good search performance. Technical problems can hinder your SEO, but good technical SEO alone isn’t enough for your website to actively grow its search presence.
Further reading
The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
How to start SEO
Here are some straightforward starting points for your SEO strategy:
1. Fix obvious technical SEO problems
Before you spend time or money on content creation or link building, make sure your technical SEO is sound. You can check for most common technical SEO problems with a free AWT account.
Here are some of the technical SEO issues on the Ahrefs blog. They’re prioritized by likely importance: blue items are notices, yellow items are warnings, and red items are errors:
As a priority, make sure your website is accessible to crawlers and your pages are allowed to be indexed by Google.
Further reading
We Studied Over 1 Million Domains to Find the Most Common Technical SEO Issues
2. Get your first few links from your network.
In the early days of SEO, earning a few relevant backlinks can make a huge improvement to SEO performance.
Link-building often feels like it’s outside your locus of control, but there are plenty of ways to predictably build good links. In the long term, creating content will make it easier to acquire backlinks. In the short term, you can use your network to get started:
Get listed on your investors’ portfolio pages
Ask integration partners to link to your website
Launch on Product Hunt
Appear on podcasts
Ask other founder friends if you can contribute to their blog
In the beginning, it’s a good idea to prioritise relevant links; over time, you can consider extra factors like domain rating.
Thanks to the following founders for sharing feedback on this guide:
Juan Bello, Porter
Liam Jones, Pilla
Yanan He, stealth startup
Aaron Beashel, Attribute
Jaroslav Filak, ExpenseMonkey
Sidenote. I’m australia mobile phone number writing this based on my experience helping startups from pre-seed to post-IPO with their search strategy. I also taught some of these ideas as part of the a16z Marketing Counsel Series.
What SEO does
You already know that you need SEO, but it’s worth reiterating the benefits. SEO can help you:
Show up when people search for your company name.
Appear when people search for problems that your product can solve.
Find the exact language people use to describe your product (and quantify the demand for it).
Siphon users away from your competitors.
Create predictable customer acquisition and reduce your customer acquisition costs.
Build a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that makes it difficult for other companies to compete with you.
When to invest in SEO
Some startups use SEO as their primary acquisition channel from day one. For these companies, SEO only makes sense if you…
Understand your target customer. Effective SEO depends on a basic understanding of your target customers’ problems and pain points. If you don’t have a handful of customers who are paying (and sticking around), it’s hard to make SEO work.
Know how your customers buy. SEO is useful for many types of products, but not all—some buying processes happen almost entirely outside of organic search (not many seven-figure hotel flooring deals start from Google searches for “carpet for high-traffic areas”).
Can afford to commit for the long term. SEO is a long-term play, requiring months to years of sustained effort to get best-in-class results.
For most companies, SEO is a channel for scaling growth, not achieving product/market fit. It’s a way to add fuel to your fire, not start the fire.
It makes sense to invest more heavily in SEO when you want to…
Diversify your acquisition channels. Most startups invest in SEO when outbound or paid advertising is starting to get expensive and generate diminishing returns.
Reduce CAC. It’s one of the only truly compounding growth channels: money spent today on SEO can generate better and better returns in the future, as your pages rank and generate traffic for years to come. This is particularly crucial for freemium business as it helps offset the negative effect of churn rates.
Make life harder for your competitors. SEO is increasingly zero-sum: a handful of brands get most of the clicks for a given keyword. It’s good for you to be one of those brands, and bad for your competitors.
How SEO works
There are three pillars of SEO:
Content: the pages you create, including articles, tools, and landing pages.
Links: backlinks from other websites back to yours.
Technical: ensuring that there are no technical problems limiting your ability to appear in search engines.
They all matter, but to get started, I recommend prioritizing like this:
1. Content
Content matters the most. The more search-optimized content you create, the more chances you create for Google to show your company to relevant people. Content is both your biggest growth lever and your greatest bottleneck.
Great content can earn great links, almost passively. Inversely, it’s very hard to earn links without great content. Content can help explain the benefits of your product, and nudge people towards a purchase. Every new content page you create provides another “doorway” from the wilds of the internet into your website.
Further reading
SEO Content: The Beginner’s Guide
2. Links
Links play a big role in SEO. Google and other search engines use links as a vouch of confidence for your site (Google’s system is known as PageRank). Sites with more, higher-quality links, generally rank better in search.
As a general rule, links that are easy to get (like adding your website to a free startup directory) will have less of an impact than links that are difficult to get (like a relevant product mention in a well-respected industry blog).
There are exceptions to these rules, but generally speaking, you want to build links:
On websites which are relevant to your business
With descriptive anchor text (your brand name or company description, not “click here”)
That are dofollow
Further reading
Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide
3. Technical
No amount of content or links will help if Google’s crawlers can’t visit your pages or your website is hidden from search.
For most new or small websites, technical SEO is not a problem. Most popular CMSs (like WordPress, Wix, or Webflow) have decent technical SEO out of the box. This might not be the case if you’re running a custom CMS and compiling a bunch of static pages.
Think of technical SEO as removing barriers to good search performance. Technical problems can hinder your SEO, but good technical SEO alone isn’t enough for your website to actively grow its search presence.
Further reading
The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO
How to start SEO
Here are some straightforward starting points for your SEO strategy:
1. Fix obvious technical SEO problems
Before you spend time or money on content creation or link building, make sure your technical SEO is sound. You can check for most common technical SEO problems with a free AWT account.
Here are some of the technical SEO issues on the Ahrefs blog. They’re prioritized by likely importance: blue items are notices, yellow items are warnings, and red items are errors:
As a priority, make sure your website is accessible to crawlers and your pages are allowed to be indexed by Google.
Further reading
We Studied Over 1 Million Domains to Find the Most Common Technical SEO Issues
2. Get your first few links from your network.
In the early days of SEO, earning a few relevant backlinks can make a huge improvement to SEO performance.
Link-building often feels like it’s outside your locus of control, but there are plenty of ways to predictably build good links. In the long term, creating content will make it easier to acquire backlinks. In the short term, you can use your network to get started:
Get listed on your investors’ portfolio pages
Ask integration partners to link to your website
Launch on Product Hunt
Appear on podcasts
Ask other founder friends if you can contribute to their blog
In the beginning, it’s a good idea to prioritise relevant links; over time, you can consider extra factors like domain rating.