Q1 open ⌕ Start a project →

SEO forfounders.

The 20% of SEO that drives 80% of results — no jargon required.

Reading time
22 min
Level
Intermediate
Chapters
5
Updated
Oct 2026

Pick the right keywords

Rank for what your customers type when they are ready to buy, not for what sounds impressive. Fewer, sharper keywords beat broad ones every time for a young company.

A keyword with 50 searches and buying intent beats one with 5,000 and none.

Rule of thumb

Make a list of the questions your sales calls start with. Those are your first pages.

Fix the technical basics

Search engines need to crawl, render and understand your pages. Most early sites lose more to slow pages and broken links than to anything else.

Fast pages · One H1 per page · Clean URLs · An XML sitemap · No broken links.

Checklist

Run a free crawl once a month and fix whatever it flags first. It is unglamorous and it works.

Write pages that answer

Each important page should answer one question better than anything else on the web. Start with the answer, then add the detail, examples and proof.

Put the direct answer in the first two sentences. Then earn the rest of the scroll.

Try this

Update your best pages every six months. Freshness matters, and so does accuracy.

Earn links honestly

Links still matter, but only good ones. Publish something genuinely useful — data, tools, templates — and tell the people who would care.

Make one genuinely useful free tool or dataset before you send a single outreach email.

Our approach

Skip link schemes. They work until they don’t, and the clean-up costs more than the gain.

Measure what matters

Track rankings for your money keywords and, more importantly, the sign-ups and enquiries that organic traffic brings. Traffic is a means, not the goal.

Rankings → Clicks → Leads → Revenue. Report on all four.

Our structure

Give it six months. SEO compounds slowly, then suddenly.

Next guide
AEO: winning AI answers
Read next →