Can you blame them? With strict reporting deadlines, ‘hockey stick’ growth targets, and immense pressure from above, it's only natural for startups to prioritise the shorter routes to revenue.

But when do startups shift towards long-term thinking? At what point does the focus become building a scalable engine instead?

I've had lots of conversations with other marketers in startups, and I've consistently been surprised to discover they didn't focus on, or necessarily value, SEO.

The truth is, it isn't startups' desire to move quickly that's holding them back. It's their deep-rooted misconceptions about organic search as a channel.

You don't need a crushingly expensive agency. You don't even need a big team of writers. Just a solid idea of what you want to be found and known for. 

Should startups be investing in SEO?

Capital efficiency is a core metric for startups, and SEO happens to deliver one of the lowest customer acquisition costs once you've built a well-oiled machine for strategy and production.

Unlike paid advertising where every click costs the business, your organic content costs remain the same irrespective of how much traffic comes through it on search engine results pages (SERPs). This means you can increase traffic without a correlated increase in cost.

SEO strategies that work in unison with paid advertising can even eliminate the need to bid on certain keywords in Google altogether by targeting the keyword with a high-ranking organic search result instead. 

Organic search also works by delivering incremental gains. Every well-produced and optimised article contributes to the success of another. 

The more high-quality, relevant content you produce, the more authoritative your website is deemed to be by search engines and, more importantly, your readers. This, in turn, determines how your content ranks in the SERP, and how trusted it is. 

This explains why SEO offers longevity and sustainability that many other channels can’t replicate. 

How to get started with SEO

Assess the market first

SEO won’t be the silver bullet and saviour for every business. You still need to meet your target market where they are, and if that isn’t online, you’ll see limited success with the channel. 

Do the initial research to estimate the addressable market and potential ROI, then determine whether it’s worth the time and money invested based on this.

This doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. Your efforts can correlate with the outcomes you expect, so you can start small if the data suggests the pool is smaller but still worthwhile. 

Get buy-in from stakeholders

Before you can invest in the channel, you need to sell it convincingly to senior stakeholders and get their buy-in.

If you’ve already seen slight or accidental success from the channel, explain how becoming intentional can supercharge this. If it has become a core revenue stream for your competitors, explain how you can minimise, or control, this competitive advantage.

Most importantly, speak the language of your stakeholders and lean on the metrics that matter most to them in your business case. Instead of talking about share of voice, talk about market share. Instead of talking about traffic generation, talk about pipeline generation. 

Choose your resources wisely

Securing investment in SEO is only half the battle. The success of the channel is contingent on how you spend that investment. 

You have a few options. You can:

• Hire an in-house SEO specialist to join your team 
• Work closely with an SEO freelancer / content specialist
• Partner with an SEO agency on strategy and execution 
• Upskill your existing content team on SEO best practices

It’s common for startups to trial SEO short-term by working with an agency or freelancer. When it shows signs of success, they then scale the channel by bringing this specialism in-house to make it more cost-effective. 

Before you make these decisions, it’s wise to develop a robust content strategy. Again, it’s common for startups to contract one-off keyword research and strategy work to external teams. If you have this knowledge in-house already, even better! 

How to turn keywords into a robust content strategy

The single most important piece of advice I’d give to startups considering SEO would be to be brutal in how they prioritise what they plan and produce. 

Startups simply don’t have the resources to waste on content that doesn’t equate to traffic or conversions. 

The fastest route to revenue is to choose the right keywords to go after in the first place, and this can only be achieved with a robust content strategy. In most scenarios, this is a long list of keywords pulled from a keyword research tool, competitor analysis, or internal discussions. 

To turn this long list of keywords into an actionable and efficient strategy, you need to consider the following things. 

Keyword volume

This is a metric used to estimate the potential addressable traffic for certain queries, and you can pull this data quickly from tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz. It should give you a rough idea of how many people your content would reach if you ranked in the higher positions for it. 

Most tools even allow you to filter by geographies, which is perfect if you only sell to certain markets and want a more accurate picture of what you could acquire. 

As a general rule, a keyword with a larger estimated search volume is preferred, but only if you believe the traffic the query will attract aligns well with your ICP and desired audience.  

Keyword difficulty

This metric is used to measure how competitive a keyword is and how difficult it might be to rank for it as a result. Like volume, it’s an estimate. 

However, it can be a good indicator of how much time you need to invest into a piece of content, and whether you’ll need to support the content with off-page SEO practices like link-building. 

Try not to place too much emphasis on the keyword research tools estimating that you’ll need ‘X’ number of backlinks to rank in the top ten, though. Evaluating how difficult it’ll be to rank can be as simple as looking at what ranks already for a keyword and assessing the competition. 

Ask yourself: 

• Are the companies ranking global powerhouses? 
• How detailed is the content that performs well right now?
• Do I think we could add value here? 

The answers to these questions are often a better guide. 

Conversion potential

Conversion potential is a more subjective measurement, and it’s not something you’ll typically find in your keyword tools. However, it is crucial to ensure the content you produce actually generates revenue for the business. 

It’s a measure of how likely traffic is to convert on your page, whether that’s to a content download, a booked demo, or even a free trial. The best way to decipher this is to analyse the intent of the query and consider where someone searching for that query is in their buying journey. 

For example, keywords with modifiers like ‘pricing’, ‘comparison’, or ‘best’ all indicate that the searcher is at the consideration or evaluation stage, while keywords with modifiers like ‘what is’ in them suggest a more educational intent, and that this traffic is further away from making a purchase or enquiry.

In an ideal world, you’d have a long list of keywords with high search volume, low difficulty, and strong conversion potential to go after. Sadly, this is rarely the case. You need to consider the trade-offs carefully to determine how wide of a net you cast.

How can startups maximise ROI from their SEO content?

Startups need to do more with less. This means consistently trying to increase yield from the time spent in various tactics. There are a few ways you can do this:

Master distribution

If you want to increase your ROI from SEO content, you need to master distribution first. 

Consider how you can use this content beyond the SERP. For example, you could create a LinkedIn carousel summarising an article you initially produced as part of your SEO strategy and use this to push referral traffic to your website. 

Similarly, you can share your top-performing SEO content in email nurture cadences to continue educating leads on your solution and product market fit. These are all great ways to get more eyes on existing content.

These shortcuts can be used to quickly and efficiently maximise the value of your SEO content without investing more in content production. It’s a win-win.  

Optimise for conversion

One of the biggest mistakes startups make is that they optimise for search, but not for conversion. 

They successfully capture relevant traffic and educate readers, but they fail to push them to a conversion activity, like downloading content, booking a demo, joining mailing lists, or getting a free trial. 

This is a great brand-building activity, but it won’t translate to the key performance indicators senior stakeholders have eyes on, like MQLs, SQLs, pipeline, and new business ARR. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to improve performance against these metrics. Here are just a handful of examples:

• Roll out tried-and-tested messaging across your content to promote a more compelling narrative.
• Put greater emphasis on your product and how it addresses the problems your target audience is solving by spotlighting features and showing UI or product visuals. 
• Implement additional conversion opportunities on-page, like testimonial banners directing to case studies, or more contextual mid-article CTAs pushing to your demo page.
• Use internal links to guide readers further through the funnel from educational pages to more transactional ones. 

12 quick-fire practical SEO tips

1. Get your technical affairs in order first by making sure your website has good hygiene and adheres to SEO best practices. Often, these are premised on delivering a better user experience.
2. Get to grips with primary and secondary keywords. A primary keyword is the main keyword you want to rank for with a page. Including secondary keywords (variations of the primary keyword) can increase your footprint for these pages. 
3. Put user-intent at the heart of your content to ensure what you’re delivering aligns with what the audience wants. 
4. Take risks with zero-volume keywords if they promise stronger buyer-intent. The traffic to the page may be smaller, but the ROI can be higher. 
5. Demonstrate expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness in your content. This can be achieved by including expert commentary, user-generated content, reviews, or even statistics linking back to the original source. 
6. Avoid shady link-building activities, even if they promise short-term wins. They almost always come back to bite you!
7. Make internal links your best friend. Linking to and from pages on your website can improve the authority of these pages and make them more navigable.
8. Prioritise genuinely helpful, unique, and valuable content over everything else. Google is getting better at rewarding this, and it gives you the best chance of competing in the SERP. 
9. Trial free SEO tools to keep channel costs low. There are plenty of free chrome extensions on the market that make optimising content simple. 
10. Focus on building topical authority by building content around your area of expertise, or what you sell. 
11. Identify, revisit and update your content when it becomes dated. This will give you a competitive edge over others ranking with older, less useful content. 
12. Never stop learning! What Google (and readers) gravitate to changes over time. The best way to grow the channel long-term is to discover what works and what doesn’t. Fortunately, the SEO community is great at knowledge-sharing. 

This article originally appeared in the May/June issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe

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