Why SaaS Startups Shouldn’t Do SEO

The boost in the SaaS market is making it increasingly competitive for new startups to find their ground. So, should early-stage SaaS startups focus on SEO?

Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) mostly a fraud, provided by SaaS Startup Marketing Agencies to use the illusiveness of the acronym to buy time without having to be accountable for results?

Do start-up marketing agencies use SEO to talk early-stage founders into a retainer that allows them to perform random optimizations and create noisy content?

Well… while I don’t believe the intentions are that malicious, the results sometimes are not that different.

Stop SEO as an Early-Stage B2B SaaS Company

If you are a founder of an early-stage software company, I recommend you stop paying an inexperienced marketer who has done a couple of SEMrush or Moz courses to tinker with your site structure, metadata, and content planning.

Instead, focus your energy on writing. Your junior SEO marketing professional is not going to beat the Google Algorithm anytime soon, and any SEO agency or consultant who can compete on the very contested SEO field is going to be paid big bucks by large corporations.

So take my word for it: if you’re still in the MVP or PMF growth stage and under $10M ARR, your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

There it is. I’ve said it. Yes, I’m following one of my key rules of being a marketer as well here. You need to have an opinion. It’s taken me many years and conversations, including with partners and colleagues where I sometimes felt I had to walk on eggshells, to come to this conclusion. It’s now a conviction that I’m willing to share broadly.

Answer the Questions No One Else Has Answered

An important rule for content marketing is that you have to understand and answer the questions of your audience. Once you do, it will not only help you understand whom you are writing for, it will also increase the relevancy of your work.

While understanding how Google and other search engines interpret what you write is a just and valid cause, I’ve concluded that it’s not worth a serious startup founder or CEO to spend time, or even money on.

Where Should You Put Your Content Marketing Energy? Just Write.

Let’s let the data do the talking. I’ve worked with 10+ software companies over the past 5 years on marketing, go-to-market, and growth strategy. The one correlation between content marketing and growth success that I’ve been able to draw from that dataset is that CEOs and founders who start to publish early can have an exponential impact.

Set aside quality time to connect with your audience, listen to their needs and answer their questions, and ultimately turn that into reusable content like blogs or videos, and product improvements. I’ve seen founders who do this outperform most of the other startups I’ve worked with.

How to Start with Content Marketing as a SaaS Startup

1. Abandon Perfection - What’s cool about Google and other search engines like YouTube, Bing, and LinkedIn, is that the audience and algorithms will filter out your best work, so you don’t even have to write perfect essays. Just be genuine, answer your audience’s questions, and you’ll be rewarded with traffic, engagement, and ultimately growth.
2. Daily Reflection - End every day by writing down a question someone had for you (a customer, partner, investor, or team member) that might be shared by others, and that you couldn’t answer by pointing to an existing blog. Type the question into Google, and see if you get good answers. If not, it’s time for you to do step 3, and start typing.
3. Just Write - Draft some notes about possible answers. Set time aside the next morning (or whenever you are most productive/creative), and dump the words on a sheet. Don’t worry about formatting, style, or structure. Just write as if you’re having a conversation with the person who asked you the question.
4. SEO Isn’t the Enemy, but Don’t Prioritize It - Of course, some SEO work can impact how your content drives session growth and becomes visible. The URL, the title, and the metadata all help people find what they are looking for. Just don’t prioritize it before the previous steps.

An Insight on Content Creation

“There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know precisely what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and want badly to say it, then all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice.”

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