SEO for Startups (Complete Guide for 2025)

SEO for startups is the act of utilizing organic search marketing strategies to increase the presence of a website in SERPs (search engine results pages) based on a set of target keywords and ideal customer personas. Startups that can benefit from SEO include technology startups, e-commerce startups, health tech startups, fintech startups, sustainability/cleantech startups, social startups, consumer goods startups, edtech startups, and AI or machine learning startups.

Key Takeaways

• SEO can be a powerful way for software, B2B, e-commerce, health tech, fintech, and other startups to gain initial traction and acquire customers.
• Most startups fail at SEO because they want SEO “to work the way they expect,” rather than learning how Google’s machines and engines are evaluating pages, domains, and content to completely determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website.
• Your first 6-month strategy for any startup should be to acquire as many positive User signals from Google as possible to amplify your level of authority for the website and avoid having to perform any extremely expensive backlink campaigns.

Types of Startups That Can Benefit from SEO

There are many types of startups that can benefit from SEO. In addition, their SEO strategy may be highly dependent on what type of startup they are grouped into. For example, whether they are a B2B startup, B2C startup, e-commerce startup or otherwise.

Here are some of the most common startups that can benefit from SEO:

• Tech Startups: Focus on software, hardware, or innovative technology. Examples include companies in AI, cloud computing, fintech, cybersecurity, and SaaS (Software as a Service).
• E-commerce Startups: Online retail platforms that sell goods or services. Examples include niche e-commerce stores or marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon, or subscription services.
• Health Tech Startups: Companies that develop technology to improve healthcare delivery. This includes telemedicine, health apps, medical devices, or innovations in biotech and pharmaceuticals.
• Fintech Startups: Focus on financial technology, such as digital wallets, online banking, investment platforms, and blockchain-related companies.
• Sustainability or Clean Tech Startups: These businesses aim to reduce environmental impact through green technologies, renewable energy, waste management, and sustainable agriculture practices.
• Social Startups: Designed to address social, environmental, or cultural issues, these startups might focus on education, poverty alleviation, or other nonprofit-driven goals.
• Consumer Goods Startups: These startups produce and sell physical goods directly to consumers, such as food products, beauty items, or health supplements.
• EdTech Startups: Companies focused on developing technology for education, including e-learning platforms, tools for schools, or apps to support self-paced learning.
• Media and Entertainment Startups: Startups in this sector might focus on content creation, digital media platforms, streaming services, or gaming companies.
• AI and Machine Learning Startups: These startups use AI to create new solutions in areas like automation, data analysis, natural language processing, and robotics.

SEO for Startups (Step-by-Step Guide)

Generally speaking, your startup SEO strategy is going to be the same regardless of the type of business you have or the industry that you’re in. To better understand what we need to do, we need to understand our limitations with a new startup website.

Limitations with our startup website and SEO

Here are the limitations we need to be aware of:

1. You’re in the Google sandbox

Whether Google will admit it or not, there’s a sandbox for new websites. I mean, think about it, if you were Google, would you potentially want to risk SPAM websites appearing in the search results pages? Probably not. That’s just simply logical.

New websites have to earn their ability to appear in SERPs (search engine results pages). Generally, from what we’ve seen, new websites stay in the sandbox for around 3-months. Meanwhile, Google will start ranking a website for smaller and easier to win keywords to collect User data on the website's validity.

2. You don’t have much authority

Authority or EEAT (expertise, experience, authority, and trust) are now the new commodities of search engines. The days are over where backlinks matter. However, to build authority, we have to prove to Google that we’re trustworthy.

The way to do that is by publishing or creating pages that are extremely helpful to Users and are better at helping our Users than competitors. This is sometimes classified into the information gain patent that’s driving much of Google rankings today.

3. You don’t have a long history of backlinks pointing to you

While backlinks don’t exactly matter like they used to, it’s still a measurable source for Google. For example, it helps them to understand new websites vs. old websites. Without a historical backlink profile of any kind, it simply further indicates to Google that you’re new. Only wanting them to put you into the sandbox even more.

Pro tip: Do not start link building new websites right away. This can often lead to a link penalty that will cause the website to tank.

4. You don’t have any content or pages on the website designed for SEO

Most likely, you’re just getting into SEO and thus, don’t have any content, pages, category pages, or landing pages that are designed for search. As a result, if you rank for no keywords, you’re not going to be sending the positive User signals that Google is looking for. This is a limitation in the sense that you simply haven’t “started,” yet.

Any Startups First 6-month SEO Strategy

When you start to learn the primary limitations above, it becomes clearer what we need to do in order to start ranking. The short list is something like the following:

• Collect positive User signals from Google: Rank easy to win content so that Google can see Users going from the search engine to your website and not returning back to Google (a positive User signal).
• Start producing topical authority pages: Build topical authority maps so that we can present to Google what our website is about and how/why they should trust us.
• Improve our SEO focus: Whether it’s fixing technical SEO needs or just generally having a comprehensive SEO strategy, making SEO a focal point can often just simply allow it to lead to some growth.

Collect positive User signals from Google

We need to get positive data collected on behalf of Google. How do we do that? Well, the process is actually rather simple. It starts with a combination of good keyword research and either written content or published pages that are far better than any competitor that’s appearing in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

To do this, here’s what we should do:

1. Step 1: Start keyword research within tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush, identify topics that are very closely related to our website's focus (B2B/e-commerce/other). This could be help guides, reviews, anything that you believe is going to be genuinely helpful to Users and that aligns with your business.
2. Step 2: Scour through all of the available pages of either content, solutions pages, or whatever the keyword’s page focus is, and read it all. Consume as much as you can about what the page is discussing, what it’s not discussing, what you know, what you want to research.
3. Step 3: Understand what type of page intent is being displayed. Whether it’s informational, commercial investigation, navigational, or transactional. Generally, Google is fairly dominated by information and transactional pages. Which is blog posts and/or service or solutions pages.
4. Step 4: Produce extremely helpful content that simplifies answers for Users. You don’t need to write a lot of words. Just be clear. And be helpful.

We want to publish as many of these types of pages as we can. Because most likely, we’re going to be picking keywords that have very low monthly search volume (MSV). As a result, as we rank our pages, we don’t have as much of an opportunity to get clicks from Google.

Positive User signals are when Google sees a User go to your website, then leave the session entirely (without Going back to Google).

Start producing topical authority pages

It’s critical that you understand the concept of topical authority and how it works. In general, it’s Google’s way of looking at an entire website and determining its overall quality within a given industry or sector. The way it does that? By measuring how well you know a given topic against its own understanding of that topic.

To do that: you simply have to produce a number of pages that all align with the various questions that your Users or customers may have, then build resource hubs that show your comprehension of the subject matter.

However, that’s not all, you also have to bring new insights to the table and actually “stump” Google’s machines in realizing that your page contains new insights it should go and capture.

Does this sound like a lot? It is. And it’s actually the reason why SEO is now complicated. However, it is very possible to be highly competitive since most companies aren’t really doing SEO properly.

Executing Against Your 6-Month Startup SEO Strategy

Here’s the way to start executing against your 6-month strategy:

1. Start with a technical SEO audit

A technical SEO audit can be a great starting point for ensuring that search engines can properly access the pages that you’re about to create and the pages that you might optimize.

Here’s some simple ways to ensure that your technical SEO audit goes well:

1. Add your website to Google Search Console: Make sure that you have Google search console connected so that any issues or page errors will be reported back to you.
2. Check for basic crawl issues: Use tools like ScreamingFrog or Ahrefs to scan the website for basic crawl issues. This would be things like issues in your robots.txt file, issues with JavaScript rendering, or otherwise.
3. Add a sitemap to Google Search Console: Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console can be a great way to indicate to Google that it should go and crawl your website for ranking purposes.

For more information on performing a comprehensive technical audit, go to our guide right here.

2. Perform keyword research

Perform keyword research to better understand how Users are looking for your services, products, or otherwise. Your objective as a startup should be to find keywords that seem like they’re ripe for disruption.

The way to do that is to look at whether your keywords have business potential, whether there’s comprehensive answers or pages that properly address what you believe the User or customer is looking for, and that the keyword itself is fairly easy to win (keyword difficulty).

Here’s what you should think about:

1. Keyword difficulty: Using tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush, you can see what the overall keyword difficulty of a keyword or cluster of keywords is. While I wouldn’t look at keyword difficulty as the primary reason to or not to produce pages or content against it. It can give you some guidance for what you need to do. For example, more difficulty may mean that you need to build more authority for the website.
2. Search intent: Understanding the difference between commercial investigation, informational, transactional, and navigational page intent can really help to put together a plan for what types of pages you need to produce for particular keywords. For example, shoppers, who are looking for pages around “running shoes” are most likely looking for category pages (transactional) that list multiple running shoes. However, “best running shoes” changes the intent quite a bit. And turns it into an informational keyword where a blog post is more likely to rank.
3. Business potential: It can be hard to completely decipher whether a keyword will align with your ideal customer profile. However, there are some clues. For example, middle-of-funnel keywords like “best project management software” can give you a clue that the searcher is using Google to research a solution that they already know they have a problem with. For example, they need project management software. Consider how the keyword aligns with someone in the buying journey and what stage of the funnel they’re in.
4. Search volume: Search volume can be a smaller indicator of potential. While it can be a great guide, it doesn’t always mean that monthly search volume is going to lead to more customers or more visitors. However, it can give you some idea of where you prioritize your time in terms of page creation.

3. Look at developing a topical authority map

Topical authority can be put into a very simple example like this. Presume that we’re building a website about running shoes. Then we’re going to want to have a website architecture that has something like this:

1. Running Shoessome text
   1. Adidas
   2. Nike
   3. Puma
   4. Brooks
   5. Hoka

Each of these will most likely be their own individual category pages that highlight both the running shoes as well as individual brands running shoes. And the keywords that these pages would align to probably look something like this:

1. Running Shoessome text
   1. Adidas Running Shoes
   2. Nike Running Shoes
   3. Puma Running Shoes
   4. Brooks Running Shoes
   5. Hoka Running Shoes

As you can see, if I were Google, I would start to understand that the website is about running shoes. That’s in short, how topical authority works. The deeper that we go into topical relevance of keywords and pages. As well as represent our knowledge of how these pages have relationships, the more authority and trust Google gives back in return.

In short, it’s a way of Google measuring User Experience before getting User signals and engagement signals from actual visitors going to the website.

For more information on building a topical authority map, view our guide here.

4. Build a comprehensive internal linking strategy

Similar to how we think about building topical authority, we have to think about building a comprehensive internal linking strategy. In short, the best internal linking strategy is one that’s very user-friendly.

Most likely, the way that Users want to navigate your website is also the way that Google wants to. We can do this through robust global navigation elements as well as using comprehensive breadcrumbs.

Here’s an example of how Chewy.com does it:

5. Create SEO-friendly content that’s competitive

Knowing how Google evaluates pages by what’s important to what’s not important can be helpful in designing the most optimal SEO-friendly pages when you have a comprehensive plan put together.

For example, Google’s machines still prioritize the following elements in understanding what the page is about. Typically, they look for the presence of a keyword and the helpfulness of the page.

Those on-page factors are some of the following:

1. Your page title
2. Your meta description
3. Your H1
4. Your headlines
5. The rest of the content on the page (contextually)

You’ll want to ensure that each of these elements includes your target keyword and aligns with the expected results that a User would want to see when they click to go to your website.

Here's how Chewy.com creates supportive guides that align with their business:

For more on-page factors, read our guide right here.

6. Allow backlinks to naturally build

Many startups aim to start their link building strategies. However, we’ve found that we can introduce a number of SPAM detectors and processors that Google has put in place. We recommend creating more comprehensive pages and doing that at scale rather than building backlinks.

Using content marketing, like bringing unique statistics out into the internet, can be far more useful in building backlinks than attempting to go outreach.

However, if you’re a new startup and there are some local directories or specific websites that you may want to list your website on, it’s great to do so.

For example, if you’re a software company, listing on ProductHunt and Crunchbase would be good link building. If you’re an e-commerce startup, mentioning your website on relevant forums and topics within relevant posts, that’s good link building.

The key is to keep it natural and to be helpful even when you’re thinking about building backlinks.

If you want help with this, feel free to look at our services for helping your new startup.

Startups SEO Opportunity

Google and other search engines have really changed a lot in the past few years. Primarily, the simplest way to describe how they’ve changed is that they work a lot more like YouTube. They rely on User engagement metrics and clues within the content itself to decipher if something is unique, engaging, addresses questions, and more.

That’s why you’re able to get the YouTube algorithm to work for you (in terms of distribution) when you really understand how it works. So here’s what we normally see happen.

Startups want SEO to work the way they think

This is the biggest mistake. Google has left behind a number of clues both in their own description of how their systems work as well as patents. It’s not a major mystery when you take a harsh look. However, it needs to be an unbiased look.

We see far too many startups be convinced of certain things. For example, convinced that building backlinks is the answer to SEO. Or convinced that you simply “need more words” on the page to rank. Or convinced of other SEO methods that they’ve read online or heard from friends.

The challenge with that is when those methods fail to work, they give up on SEO or organic search altogether and are convinced that it “doesn’t work.” Meanwhile, the competitors of the company are taking all the rewards.

Learn how Google works and then do that

Google has given us some very simple instructions:

1. Create extremely helpful content.
2. Address Users questions.
3. Bring unique insights to the internet.

Generally, it’s as simple as that. However, the more you try to manipulate the search engines, the further away from this you’ll get. Reading the Google search quality rater guidelines can be extremely helpful in seeing how Google is trying to design its systems to match up with pages and content.

Top Mistakes Startups Make with SEO

Here are the top mistakes that startups make with SEO and how you can avoid doing the same:

1. Trying to manipulate search engines

Too many startups try to learn how to do SEO themselves, then think that “it’ll be easy.” The reality is that the mentality that brings often drives teams toward trying to manipulate search engines. They keyword stuff, they repeat content, they use tactics that they think are “blackhat.”

However, this often hurts the company long term. And is the primary reason why trusted brands appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and not startups.

2. Building too many backlinks too early

Startups often want to focus on building domain authority and backlinks. However, doing this far too quickly and far too soon can lead to a number of red flags that Google’s processors start to identify. They see far too many links getting built, leading to yet another way of spotting that you’re trying to manipulate the search engine.

The best way to build early backlinks is simply to produce amazing content that gets links to it in a natural way. And spend the time to invest in building out that content marketing.

3. Not producing right page types based on keyword page intent

Not understanding what keywords are going to informational pages or going to transactional pages can be detrimental. For example, “best running shoes” is not going to be a product category page for an e-commerce company. It’s going to be an informational blog post with pictures, reviews, pros, cons, and all other types of information that runners would need to evaluate the best shoe for them.

If you’re not aware of how these keywords align to the SERPs (search engine results pages), you’re most likely spending time in the wrong place.

4. Mass producing AI-generated content

AI-content, while useful, doesn’t really say anything new. And if you’ve been reading, Google is really looking for new and unique insights. AI-generated content usually remixes publicly available content that’s on the internet. As a result, you’re more likely to get a penalty for having a SPAM website (not because of the AI-content but because of the quality of those pages and scoring of the quality of those pages that’s occurring) than rank well.

Trying to “dupe” or “cheat” the system by using AI-content worked at some point (around 2019), however, Google’s systems have become far more comprehensive at identifying when someone is putting new insights out there that allows their systems to gain information to offer up to their Users (think about it, Google is a Q&A machine, we put in questions, people get answers—why would they want your AI-content when they can generate their own).