SEO Consultant for Multi-Location Brands, Local Marketplaces & B2B SaaS. Working with some of the biggest and some of the smallest businesses in the world like Walmart, Crunchbase & The Difference Landscapers.
Let's talk about SEO for start-ups. As Eli Schwartz likes to say, ideally startups shouldn't be investing in SEO until they have found product-market fit. I have a very slight disagreement (or perhaps I have not read his thoughts closely enough) in that I think you can bake basic SEO into your product from the get-go with minimal effort. Regardless, I always love seeing when startups turn on the SEO jets. We are currently working with a fast-growing startup that for two years has willfully ignored SEO. They are much more focused on improving the product via word-of-mouth/virality from customers. It has been working, but something changed recently. Two weeks ago the CEO pinged me and asked how they could incorporate SEO into a strategy to gain more visibility. It was basically the first time SEO aligned with a product decision. As much as SEO can be cool, it was a very cool strategy. Within minutes the team was incorporated into the thread and started to build to the specifications I laid out. Every day they iterated a bit more. Over the past week, Google started to take notice. Not huge traffic by any means, but the quality of this traffic pretty much validates the strategy and it will likely accelerate over the next few months as the team builds upon it. The TLDR: Startups that succeed at SEO treat it like any other product feature. Come up with a plan, build, iterate, profit :)