Rank #1 on Google: SEO guide for startup founders

By Anastasiia Krasiukova, SEO/ASO lead at Promova & portfolio advisor at F1V

After working with over 200 businesses, I’d say with no doubt: SEO can’t be a growth channel for every startup.

SEO takes time, money, and sometimes a lot of both. Depending on the industry, startups spend $2-10k on Google SEO monthly.

But before working on it, founders should consult an expert to determine the value, cost, and competitor strategies of SEO for their startup. A startup building complex B2B software, for example, might find it more effective to focus on direct sales.

If SEO seems the right way for you — great. A website that’s properly SEO-optimized can generate lots of leads and sales, reducing customer acquisition costs. On average, 36% of all web traffic comes from organic searches. In the tech industry, it’s 41%.

Talking about Google, SEO is not limited to it; there are other search engines like Bing or Yahoo. But still, Google remains the most popular website in the world, with 175B monthly visits.

When to start working on SEO

I’ve seen many companies make the same mistake: They first create a website and then involve an SEO specialist (or don’t involve one at all).

But the process should be done the other way around: Find an SEO specialist once you start creating a website. If you do it when the site’s ready, you may have to change everything. It’s not critical for a landing page but may be costly for an e-commerce website with a hell of pages.

A startup doesn’t necessarily need to hire a full-time SEO specialist; this role can be part-time or outsourced. When interviewing candidates, ask about their previous projects. Did they bring websites to the top by keywords? How much did the organic traffic improve? How did it impact sales?

A website’s organic growth of two-three times and ranking in the top 10 search results are great achievements. A perfect scenario is a website in the top three search results: According to a recent study, the first three results in Google receive about 70% of all clicks, with the first one getting about 40%.

SEO efforts can bring the first yields within three to six months. However, SEO can take one or more years to start paying off, especially in highly competitive niches.

As startups usually can’t wait that long, they must combine SEO with direct sales, paid advertising, or other activities. Contextual advertising on Google can boost SEO performance.

Unlike paid ads, which are used for quick results, SEO requires ongoing work because search engine algorithms change. Also, your rivals are constantly working to move their websites to the top and push yours down.

4 pillars of SEO

The right SEO strategy includes improving on-page, off-page, technical SEO, and behavioral factors.

On-page SEO improves separate web pages so that they can get higher rankings and more relevant traffic from search engines. This includes inserting keywords in content and right-structuring it according to user search intents, optimizing meta tags, headers, images, and internal links. It’s done to make a website good-looking for both users and search engines.

Off-page SEO consists of actions taken outside a website that affect search engine rankings. It’s mainly about getting backlinks from trustworthy resources like media or industry websites, signaling to search engines that a specific website is reliable. Having no backlinks is one of the reasons why about 97% of websites don’t get organic traffic from Google.

Technical SEO improves a website's technical parts to meet search engine standards. This includes making it faster, mobile-friendly, easy to crawl and index, and securing it with HTTPS.

Behavioral factors show how users interact with a website, like how often they click through, how quickly they leave, and how long they stay on different pages. User-friendly and engaging websites posting high-quality content would rank better.

Google itself claims it “likes'' websites abiding by its E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principle. It encourages sharing helpful content, getting trusted backlinks, having a safe and well-working website, and improving user experience.

Use SEO tools

To make SEO optimization more effective, I recommend using these tools:

• Google Keyword Planner (by Google Ads). A free tool giving rough estimates of the popularity of different search queries.
• Ahrefs. A paid tool that helps analyze competitors' strategies, collect semantics, analyze external links, and track a website’s organic visibility.
• Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Free tools for analyzing SEO metrics, including website traffic, user behavior, and visibility in Google search results.
• Screaming Frog (optional). A paid tool for analyzing on-page and technical SEO. This tool is particularly helpful for technical SEO audits, as it can identify issues that Ahrefs might not detect.

Also, I recommend reading SEO Starter Guide by Google.

If you are an F1V portfolio startup and want to consult with Anastasiia Krasiukova on SEO optimization, email us at go@flyerone.vc.

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