SEO for (Busy) Founders

Here are some of the technical SEO issues on the Ahrefs blog. They’re prioritized by likely importance: blue items are notices, yellow items are warnings, and red items are errors:

As a priority, make sure your website is accessible to crawlers and your pages are allowed to be indexed by Google.

2. Get your first few links from your network.

In the early days of SEO, earning a few relevant backlinks can make a huge improvement to SEO performance.

Link-building often feels like it’s outside your locus of control, but there are plenty of ways to predictably build good links. In the long term, creating content will make it easier to acquire backlinks. In the short term, you can use your network to get started:

• Get listed on your investors’ portfolio pages
• Ask integration partners to link to your website
• Launch on Product Hunt
• Appear on podcasts
• Ask other founder friends if you can contribute to their blog

In the beginning, it’s a good idea to prioritise relevant links; over time, you can consider extra factors like domain rating.

3. Find your competitor’s best pages (and copy them)

Start making content by finding the pages that are driving the most organic traffic for your competitors, and creating your own (better) versions.

You can find these pages in Ahrefs using the Top Pages report. Here’s a list of Ramp’s most popular blog articles, ordered by estimated organic traffic:

If I competed with Ramp, I would consider publishing my own articles targeting some of these keywords—like this guide to the easiest business credit cards to get, generating an esteemed 2,157 visits from organic search each month.

You can also see any website’s most linked-to pages using the Best by links report. Here, Ramp’s guide about how to apply for a business credit card has earned 211 backlinks from 99 different websites:

If we created a similar guide, there’s a good likelihood we could earn links with it too.

The importance of ‘business potential’

Many companies try to rank for keywords that have lots of potential traffic but very little relevance to their product. Instead, it’s better to write about problems your product can solve. That way, every visitor is a potential customer.

You can use the “Business potential” framework to help evaluate each topic. Score each keyword, and prioritize those with a high business potential:

The goal of SEO is not just to chase high keyword volumes and amass backlinks, but to attract people that have a substantial chance of becoming a customer.

4. Find questions your target audience asks (and answer them)

Your potential customers probably have thousands of questions about your product and your industry. By identifying the most popular of these questions—and then writing helpful answers—you can create a steady stream of relevant people visiting your website.

Start by thinking up a few “seed” keywords: core topics that relate very strongly to your product.

For a company like Ramp, that might be “business credit cards”. In our Keywords Explorer tool, you can use AI to help with this brainstorming process:

Hit “search”, and you’ll be able to see the estimated number of searches each keyword gets¹, and an estimate of how difficult it will be to successfully rank for the topic² (along with a bunch of extra data points):

You can expand your list of topics using the Matching terms, Related terms, and Search suggestions reports to show hundreds of related keywords:

If your website is relatively new, you’ll struggle to rank for high-competition keywords. It’s better to start by targeting low-difficulty keywords and gradually working towards more competitive ones as you earn more backlinks and generate more organic traffic.

You can find these keywords in Ahrefs by filtering to show keywords with a low difficulty (say, up to 30):

5. Create integration pages and competitor comparison pages

Most startups are competing against established companies. Creating pages that draw direct comparison between your product and these competitors can be a great SEO strategy, allowing you to capture existing demand for products like yours, instead of trying to create demand from scratch.

Here’s a list of Podia’s competitor comparison pages. Their comparison with Stan Store generates an estimated 3,444 organic visits to their website each month:

These pages are worth creating even if you don’t have feature parity with your competitors. It’s an opportunity to explain your differences, the thought process behind your product decisions, and begin the long-term process of positioning yourself as a meaningful competitor to the industry giants.

If your product is part of a bigger software ecosystem—if you’re a Shopify app, or you integrate with Google Looker Studio—you can also build landing pages for each of your integration partners. These allow you to capture a small-portion of the existing demand for the big, popular products you integrate with.

Here’s Ahrefs data for the keyword google looker studio connectors: low difficulty, a hundred searches per month, and highly relevant for products that integrate with Looker:

6. Get creative

When you’re starting SEO, the fastest, most direct route to revenue is to take inspiration from the tried-and-tested topics that already make money for your competitors. But in the long term, there’s a real benefit to doing things that other companies haven’t tried yet.

SEO is a creative process. With a bit of research, you can probably find significant alpha for yourself: topics your competitors haven’t covered, pain points that no one solves, integrations in high demand, or even burgeoning keywords that are about to become very popular.

The perennial startup advice applies here too: talk to your customers. Learn about their problems and questions, brainstorm new topics to cover, and use a tool like Ahrefs to help vet whether those ideas are worth your time.

example from Contently) and high moderation costs.

Check out these examples:

4. Free tools: free versions of your product functionality

Free tools involve offering a simplified version of your product, or tools tailored to solving specific problems.

There are many high-traffic keywords that can only be targeted using free tools. Here’s the search results page for “free backlink checker”. The first 19 results are all free tools, without an article in sight:

Free tools can provide a good opportunity to naturally introduce your paid product to free users. The added complexity of creating these tools also means that this strategy is harder for your competitors to immediately copy.

As an obvious downside, these tools take development resources to build and can generate sizeable operating costs.

See these examples of free tool strategies:

Is SEO dying?

SEO isn’t dying, but it is changing. ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and other LLMs offer an alternate way for users to access information online. AI Overviews have the potential to reduce the number of people visiting websites from search results. AI-generated content is increasing the competition in many search results.

The best practices of SEO remain the same, but it’s worth exploring topics like LLM optimization and learning about AI Overviews.

How should I make content?

There are four main ways to create, each with pros and cons:

• In-house: Creating content yourself offers the greatest control over quality, but necessitates a ton of time and knowledge to create.
• Freelancers: Relatively affordable but require lots of sourcing writers, management, quality control, and editing.
• Agencies: Offer a done-for-you service that often benefits from experience working across dozens of similar companies, but can be very expensive.
• AI content generation: Extremely cheap to create but still requires marketing and SEO expertise to get good results. Publishing bad AI content can have a negative impact on your SEO.

Should we hire an SEO agency?

A great SEO agency can have a huge positive impact on your growth. The hard part is finding the great ones. I’ve had positive experiences with the following agencies: Organic Growth Marketing, Growth Plays, Graphite, Siege Media,and Animalz (I used to work at Animalz).

How do I know it’s working?

At an early stage, it’s hard to set concrete goals and KPIs. Instead, just aim for month-over-month improvement in a handful of core metrics, like organic website traffic, keyword rankings, and backlinks.

Leading indicators can be helpful: it’s a good sign if recently published pages begin to rank in low positions for dozens of similar keywords.

To track organic traffic, set up Google Search Console. For keyword rankings and backlinks, use Ahrefs. You can also use a web analytics tool like GA4 or Ahrefs Website Analytics (coming soon) to track website traffic from non-search sources.

How often should I publish?

As a general rule, the more often you publish, the better, because of SEO’s ability to compound over time. There is one exception: publishing hundreds (or thousands) of articles in a short period of time might signal to Google that your website is likely creating AI content.

Does AI content work?

Generative AI can be helpful for speeding up parts of the SEO workflow, like braintorming titles, creating metadata, or helping to write. But as a general rule, “pure” AI content doesn’t perform very well (and many of Google’s recent algorithm updates are designed to reduce the visibility of low-value AI content).

For more context, read our article about AI content strategies: AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy

Does black hat SEO work?

Black hat SEO is the process of taking advantage of temporary loopholes in Google’s ranking systems.

The key word is temporary. Black hat SEO has a short shelf-life, and can often end in websites being completely demoted or deindexed from Google’s search results. If you’re building a company for the long-term, it’s probably not worth the risk.

Final thoughts

I recommend these guides to SEO and content marketing written by startup founders and investors:

Further reading