SEO for startups: the first 90 days with no authority and no budget

SEO for startups is a different job from SEO for an established company. You have no domain authority, so the competitive keywords are out of reach for now. You have no budget, so the tool stack and the agency retainer can wait. And you have little time, so every hour has to go to pages that can bring in a customer. In practice that means three things in the first 90 days: fix the technical basics once, publish about ten pages aimed at searches with low competition and clear buying intent, and earn your first links from people who already know you. Skip head terms, link packages and anything that needs a paid tool to get started.

Is SEO for startups worth it?

Usually, but check two things first.

People have to search for the problem. Type the problem your product solves into Google and read the autocomplete suggestions and the People Also Ask box. If competitors' pages rank for those searches, there is demand. If nothing related comes up, you are in a category people don't search for yet. SEO will still help with your brand name and with nearby searches, but most early customers will come from somewhere else.

You have to know who buys. SEO pages are written in your buyer's words. If you can't yet describe the buyer and the moment they go looking for a solution, talk to ten customers before you write ten pages.

And be honest about time. SEO compounds over months. If you need customers this month, run SEO next to a faster channel. Our guide on how to get traffic to your website compares what each channel costs and how fast it works.

Days 1 to 14: the foundation

This is a few afternoons of work, done once.

  1. Verify the site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your XML sitemap to both.
  2. Set up Google Analytics 4 and mark sign-up, demo request or purchase as a key event, so you can later see which pages bring customers.
  3. Search site:yourdomain.com and look at what Google has indexed. Watch for staging subdomains, test pages and app screens that should not be there.
  4. Check for leftovers from development: a robots.txt that disallows everything, or a noindex tag that was meant for the staging site and shipped to production.
  5. Give every page one title and one H1 that say what the page is, in the words someone would search.
  6. Make the homepage say what the product does in its first sentence. Add an about page with the founders' names, a pricing page and a way to get in touch. These pages tell visitors, and any engine summarizing your company, who is behind it.

Then run a free website audit to catch what you missed. It reads robots.txt and your sitemap, checks up to 30 pages, and flags broken URLs, thin pages, missing descriptions and duplicate titles, each with its fix.

How to do SEO for a coded website

Many startups build the marketing site with the same framework as the product: Next.js, React, Vue or a custom stack. The rules are the same as for any site, but a few things break more often:

  • Render marketing pages on the server or at build time. Google can run JavaScript, but rendering waits in a queue, and Google's JavaScript SEO guide still recommends server-side rendering or pre-rendering, partly because not every bot can run JavaScript.
  • Use real <a href> links between pages. A click handler on a div is not a link to a crawler.
  • Give each route its own title, description and canonical URL. One title shared across the whole app is a common bug.
  • Return a real 404 status for pages that don't exist.
  • Keep logged-in routes out of the index with noindex, not with robots.txt alone. Our SEO for SaaS playbook covers app routes in more detail.
  • Generate the sitemap from your routes, so new pages appear in it without anyone remembering to add them.

Days 15 to 60: ten pages a new domain can rank

A brand-new domain has little chance on searches where page one is full of sites with years of links behind them. It can compete where the big sites haven't bothered: specific, lower-volume searches from people who are close to buying.

Good first pages for a startup:

  • "[Incumbent] alternatives", for the tool your buyers use today and want to leave. Be fair about what the incumbent does well.
  • "[Your category] for [specific group]", only for groups you actually serve, with details that are true for them.
  • "How to [do the job your product does]": a specific, step-by-step guide where your product is one of the ways, not the only one.
  • An integration page for each tool you connect to.
  • A template, checklist or calculator your buyers would otherwise build in a spreadsheet.

You can find these without a paid keyword tool:

  • Google autocomplete and the People Also Ask box, for your problem and for your competitors' names.
  • Reddit and niche forums, for the exact phrasing of the questions people post.
  • Your sales calls, demo notes and support inbox. The questions people ask before they buy are the searches they ran before they found you.
  • Search Console's Performance report, once you have a few weeks of data. Queries with impressions but no clicks show what Google already thinks you are relevant for.

Write each page with something only you can add: screenshots of your product doing the task, your own numbers, the founder's experience of the problem. That is the part a larger site with a bigger budget can't copy. Ten pages written this way will do more for you than fifty generic posts on topics the big sites already own.

Links still matter for ranking, and a new site has none. Start with the places where someone already knows you:

  • Your investors' and accelerator's portfolio pages.
  • Integration partners' marketplaces and app directories.
  • Customers who keep a "tools we use" or "partners" page.
  • Software and launch directories people actually browse: Product Hunt, G2, Capterra, and the directories specific to your niche.
  • Your open-source repositories, conference talks and podcast appearances. Most shows link to guests in their show notes.
  • Journalist request services such as HARO, Qwoted and Featured, where you answer a reporter's question and may be quoted with a link.

A free tool or a small piece of original data is the next step once those are done. Our guide on how to get backlinks walks through both.

Skip anything that looks like a shortcut. Google's spam policies list buying links, "excessive link exchanges", "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" and guest posts with optimized anchor text as link spam. A startup can't afford a penalty while it has nothing else working.

What to skip in the first 90 days

  • Head terms. "CRM software" or "project management tool" will not rank for a new domain any time soon. Write for the specific searches first.
  • A paid tool stack. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics 4 and Screaming Frog's free crawler, which handles 500 URLs, cover what you need now.
  • Programmatic pages at scale. Until you know which page template converts, a thousand generated pages are a thousand pages to fix.
  • Daily posts on generic topics. "What is [category]" results already belong to large sites.
  • Chasing third-party authority scores. Domain Rating and Domain Authority are estimates made by tool vendors, not numbers Google uses. They help you compare sites; they are not the goal.
  • Link packages, private blog networks and paid guest posts.

Is SEO dead now with AI?

No. Google says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode" beyond being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. The foundation above is the same foundation those AI features draw from.

What is new is that many buyers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a short list of tools, and the answer names a handful of brands. A startup that is mentioned on comparison pages, review sites and community threads gives those engines more to find.

Check your starting point with the AI visibility checker. It puts your buyers' questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and shows whether you are named and who is named instead. For a new site, expect zero mentions at first. That is the baseline you measure against.

Can ChatGPT do SEO?

It can do parts of it. ChatGPT can brainstorm topics, draft outlines, rewrite a meta description and explain a technical error. It can't see your Search Console data, it doesn't crawl your whole site, and it doesn't know what your customers said on last week's calls.

Google allows AI-assisted content. Its guidance on generative AI content says to fact-check AI-generated content before publishing, and warns that using AI to "generate many pages without adding value for users" may break the scaled content abuse policy. Use it to go faster on pages you would have written anyway, with your own knowledge in them.

Some tools now run the whole loop. Bottally, for example, researches keywords, audits the site, reads what competitors publish and publishes one article a day. That saves founder hours. It doesn't replace the alternatives page or the customer insight only the founder has.

When should a startup hire for SEO?

Hire when one of these is true:

  • Some pages already bring sign-ups, and you want more of them than you can write.
  • A founder hour is clearly worth more than what the help costs.
  • You are about to migrate the site or change domains, where one technical mistake can undo what you have built.

The options, roughly from cheapest to most expensive: software that automates the research and publishing, a freelance writer or technical SEO for a fixed project, an agency on retainer, and an in-house hire. We compared two of these in AI SEO agent vs SEO agency.

How to choose the right SEO company

Google publishes a list of questions to ask a potential SEO: examples of past work, how they measure success, what results they expect and in what timeframe, whether they will explain every change they make, and whether they follow Google Search Essentials. The same page is blunt about guarantees: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

Red flags for a startup:

  • Guaranteed rankings or traffic numbers.
  • A link-building package priced per link.
  • Reports in keyword positions and visits, with no mention of sign-ups.
  • No questions about your customers before the proposal.

Your first step

Run the free website audit on your site today. It takes about a minute, needs no sign-up, and turns days 1 to 14 into a checklist. When you are ready to hand off the weekly research and publishing, Bottally Pro is $99 a month.