Let's start with a hard truth

SEO can easily take a year to get any results.

Even if you do everything right, you can get nothing out of it.

Doing SEO well takes up an enormous amount of resources.

Any SEO hacks you do to overcome the above can get you banned from Google.

All this to say: SEO is REALLY hard, will take up all of your time and could get you nothing. Which is why I am about to go over a ton of research you need to do before you even begin.

You are going to spend 500+ hours on SEO, you need that time put in just the right place, or it will be wasted.

An important question

With everything, I just described, is SEO worth your time as a startup? Can you focus somewhere else and do SEO later?

The answer is... sort of?

When done right, it can lead to incredible growth for a company. It's also technically "free" in that you can do it without spending any money. Instead, it uses your time.

What I generally recommend to my clients is to do SEO in separate parts. Start with the technical, then move on to the content creation and link building at your own pace.

The content creation and link building parts that I will detail below are the ones that take the most time. The issue is, without the technical foundation, the value of these is very small.

The standard process is wrong

There is a process that most people follow for SEO and I find it's mostly a waste of time. That process goes something like this:

They put together a list of keywords, maybe even rank them based on estimated traffic, they then make pages for those keywords and then get a bunch of links pointing to those pages.

The general ideas here are fine: that WILL get you ranked in Google.

The issue is that often the keywords they put all the work towards are not optimal. Keywords will be picked based on traffic and difficulty rather than relevance and context.

My suggestion: skip the keyword research and own topics. Let's go into my process though:

My process

Step 1: technical improvements to your website

Creating content and building links takes an enormous amount of time, as I said above. Which is why I suggest starting with the technical side. This is the foundation of your website and will make sure that all the future work you do gets the best results as quickly as possible.

Let's do this rapid fire because it's a lot faster for me to write it out. These are short sentences, but each one might be a good amount of work. Do this work before making ANY content.

These are the most common issues I encounter with startup sites:

Step 2: people research.

You need to understand what people ask, what problems they have, and what things they love. Kind of like when you did product research (you did product research, right?)

Finding the topics people care about in your vertical is no easy task, though. There is no killer app that does it and not GPT prompt that will get you the human results.

You need to talk to your customers.

It really is as simple as that. Have conversations with your customers and prospects, and take detailed notes on the questions they ask and things they care about.

**Step 3: **build out content hubs based on topics

Instead of building pages around keywords, build "hubs" of information about topics.

These hubs can have FAQs, blog posts, videos, podcast episodes and more, all relating to a topic. (we will speak about podcasts a little later).

This sounds simple but can be a huge task - you should have thousands of words of content on each topic that you want to own.

A useful tool is "Answer the Public." . I also recommend using Google's autocomplete in your favour. Start by typing in a keyword you care about, then simply add question words to the start and see what pops up. You would be amazed by how many great questions come up this way.

The main thing to know is that your goal is to be the expert in this field and be the place people get information about the topic. The "how" is wide open.

An important note on tracking success

Often people will do a ton of SEO and track it in a very suboptimal way. It can get complicated looking at rank versus traffic versus conversion, but I want to just give some important high level notes:

Branded SEO traffic doesn't mean much

It's important to differentiate branded SEO traffic from non-branded. Brand traffic can ebb and flow and change a ton based on outside factors that have nothing to do with SEO.

If you get a big funding round and that gets talked about a ton, you will naturally get a TON more brand traffic as people are curious about your company. It does NOT mean those are potential customers.

Instead, your SEO focus should be on unbranded traffic.

Wow, this is getting long. I haven't even talked about link building yet. Let's mix things up and start a new page...