SEO for startups: what to do first and what to skip
·4 min read
SEO for startups comes down to one afternoon of foundations now and real content work only once you know who buys and what they search. Make the site crawlable, give each page one clear job, write the few pages your buyers search for right before they buy, and make sure AI crawlers can read your home page. Skip keyword tools, link building and a blog calendar until people already search for the problem you solve.
Most early teams either ignore search or spend a month on busywork a 40-page site does not need.
When SEO for startups is worth it, and when it is not yet
SEO pays off when people already type your problem into Google. It does little when you are creating a category nobody searches for yet.
Write down the five phrases a buyer would type right before signing up and search them. If competitors rank for them, search is a real channel for you. If the results are unrelated, your buyers find you through sales, communities and word of mouth, and content will not change that this year.
| Your situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Pre-launch or pivoting monthly | Foundations only. No content program. |
| Buyers search for the problem or for competitors | Foundations plus 5 to 10 bottom-of-funnel pages |
| New category, little search demand | Foundations, then focus on getting mentioned where buyers ask AI and forums |
| Product-market fit, steady signups | Hire or contract someone to own SEO |
Do the foundations even in the "not yet" rows. They cost a day now and a week after a redesign.
Low-effort SEO foundations for a startup site
The foundations are whatever stops Google from indexing you at all.
- Make sure robots.txt does not still carry the
Disallow: /from staging. Our robots.txt checker shows which rule matches each crawler. - Add the domain in Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. It is the only place Google tells you which pages it indexed and why it skipped the rest. See getting Google to index your site.
- Pick www or non-www, force HTTPS, and 301 redirect the other versions.
- Give every page its own title. "Acme" on every tab tells Google nothing. "Acme: invoicing for freelance designers" does.
- Render marketing pages on the server. Run
curl -s https://yoursite.com | grep -i "your headline". No match means crawlers see an empty shell.
That is the whole technical job for a small site. If you sell software, the SaaS SEO guide covers keeping the app out of the index and writing comparison pages.
What startups should skip
Most SEO advice assumes thousands of pages and a team to match. Ignore these until you have traction.
- Daily rank tracking. A new domain's rankings swing for weeks. Check Search Console monthly.
- Buying links. It breaks Google's spam policies. Earn mentions through launches, partner integration lists and customers who write about you.
- Definition posts. "What is invoicing" competes with sites that have ranked for a decade. Write it after the pages that convert.
- Polishing passing Core Web Vitals. Fix anything rated poor and stop there.
- Schema everywhere. Organization markup on the home page takes ten minutes. Google's AI optimization guide says structured data is not required for its generative AI search.
Write the pages buyers search right before they buy
Your first content should match searches from people who are already shopping. A team with no SEO person can write five of these in a week.
- A page per use case where the product does something specific, like "invoicing for agencies".
- A page per integration that exists today.
- An honest "[competitor] alternatives" page for the two or three tools buyers compare you with.
- A pricing page in plain HTML that states the starting price.
Volumes are small, and that is fine. Someone searching "Acme vs Harvest" is deciding this week. Our keyword ideas tool expands a seed phrase into Google autocomplete suggestions, but your sales calls are a better source. Write down the exact words prospects use.
Getting a startup into AI answers
Buyers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what is the best invoicing tool for a two-person studio" and get a shortlist. A startup gets on that list through readable pages and mentions elsewhere.
Readable pages are in your control. Your home page should say in one sentence what the product is, who it is for and what it costs to start. Models quote specifics and skip slogans. Make sure robots.txt and your CDN bot protection let OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot fetch the marketing site. OpenAI lists its crawlers in its bot documentation.
Mentions take longer. AI shortlists lean on review sites, comparison articles and forum threads, so a launch post or an honest customer review can do more than another page on your own site. See getting mentioned by AI.
ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it cites, so filter for it in your analytics.
Check your startup's site before you write anything
Our website check runs the foundations above on your home page plus up to 2 more pages on the same origin. Pick the home page, pricing and your best use case page. The default selection covers crawling and indexing, on-page SEO, structured data and content, and costs 67 credits for one page plus 47 per extra page. Add rendering and mobile to compare raw HTML with what an AI crawler sees.
You get one prioritized fix list and 0 to 100 scores for SEO readiness, AEO readiness and AI access. It does not read Search Console, track rankings or check backlinks. A quick home page preview on /check-website costs no credits, needs no account and takes about 20 seconds.