Paid ads stop the moment you stop paying. Organic search compounds. In 2026, your potential users are discovering solutions on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews before they ever reach your website. I help early-stage startups build organic search presence that covers both, attracts the right users and gives you a channel you actually own long-term.
Most startups fall into one of two traps. They either ignore SEO completely in the early stages, assuming it is something to worry about later, or they hand it to a large agency that charges enterprise prices and moves at enterprise speed. Neither works.
In 2026 there is a third mistake that even well-run startups are making: optimising for Google only. Your target users are now asking ChatGPT which tools to use, searching Perplexity for solution comparisons and reading Google AI Overviews before they click anything. Getting your startup cited in those AI-generated answers is a genuine competitive advantage, and it is far easier to build correctly from the start than to retrofit later.
I work specifically with early-stage and growth-stage startups. That means I understand limited runway, fast-changing priorities and the need to see traction quickly. Every decision is prioritised by impact relative to the effort and cost involved, covering both Google rankings and AI search visibility from day one.
There is also a cost to waiting that most founders underestimate. SEO compounds, but it compounds on a delay. A page you publish and optimise today is still working for you in eighteen months. A page you keep postponing until "after the next fundraise" or "after we hit product-market fit" is eighteen months of compounding you never get back. Your competitors who started earlier are not just ahead on rankings, they are ahead on the backlinks, the indexed history and the topical authority that make every future page easier to rank. None of that is catch-up-able on demand, no matter how big a budget you eventually have.
Being early actually works in your favour more than most founders realise. Large, established companies move slowly on SEO because every page change goes through legal, brand and a dozen stakeholders. A startup can ship a landing page, test a content angle or restructure a category in a day. That speed is a real advantage in AI search specifically, because the systems powering ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews reward freshness, clear structure and unambiguous entity signals — things a lean team can execute on far faster than a company with an eleven-person content review process. The goal of this engagement is to turn that speed into a durable head start before your category gets crowded.
This is not a watered-down version of standard SEO. It is a deliberately sequenced approach that gets early traction fast, builds compounding organic growth over time and ensures your startup is visible in both Google and AI search from the start.
Your target users are using ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to discover and compare solutions before visiting any website. I audit whether AI crawlers such as GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can actually access your site, configure your robots.txt and llms.txt correctly, and structure your content so answer engines can extract clean, quotable facts rather than marketing fluff. This includes clear entity definitions on your homepage and about page, consistent naming of your product across the web, and content formatted with the direct answers, comparisons and definitions that large language models pull from when generating a response. This is not a bolt-on add-on. It is included in every startup engagement because it is far cheaper to build correctly the first time than to restructure a site later.
New sites cannot compete head-to-head with established players on broad, high-volume terms, and trying to is the single most common way startups waste their first six months of SEO. I run keyword research focused on specific, lower-competition, high-intent terms: long-tail queries, comparison searches, "best tool for X" style questions and problem-aware phrases your ideal early customer is actually typing. These terms are realistic to rank for within weeks or months rather than years, and they bring in users who are further along in their decision process. As rankings and domain authority build, we systematically expand into broader and more competitive terms, so the keyword strategy scales alongside your product rather than staying static.
Getting your site structure right from the start saves you from expensive and disruptive rebuilds twelve months later, right when you can least afford the engineering time. I review and design your URL structure, category and subcategory hierarchy, internal linking logic and how new pages plug into that structure as you launch features, blog posts or new product lines. The goal is a site where crawlers can find and understand every important page without depending on the sitemap alone, where topical clusters reinforce each other through internal links, and where your engineering team never has to touch URLs or navigation again just to accommodate SEO.
One good piece of content published consistently beats a burst of mediocre posts every time. I build a content plan mapped to your buyer's actual journey: top-of-funnel educational content that earns traffic and links, mid-funnel comparison and "alternative to" pages that capture people actively evaluating options, and bottom-funnel content that supports the final decision. Every piece is structured with clear headings, direct answers near the top and genuine expertise, not generic filler, so it positions your startup as a real authority in your niche and gives AI systems something worth citing. Where useful, I also work with your product and founder knowledge directly, since firsthand experience is one of the strongest ranking and trust signals available to a new brand.
Google uses page experience as a ranking factor and rightly so. Slow, poorly built sites lose rankings and lose users, and this is especially common on startup sites built quickly on frameworks that were never optimised for performance. I audit and fix Core Web Vitals issues: largest contentful paint, layout shift, interaction responsiveness, image and script bloat, render-blocking resources and mobile performance specifically, since most of your organic traffic will arrive on a phone. I also clean up crawl errors, broken redirects, duplicate content and indexing issues, so nothing technical is silently capping the ceiling on what your content and keyword work can achieve.
You do not need a huge budget to earn authoritative backlinks early on. I use your startup's natural advantages: PR opportunities tied to funding announcements or product launches, listings on relevant product directories and marketplaces, guest contributions and mentions within founder and industry communities, ecosystem and integration partnerships, and digital press outreach. Every link is earned through white-hat methods from genuinely relevant, reasonably authoritative sites, never bought in bulk from link farms that put your domain at risk. Strong third-party mentions also increase how frequently AI systems cite your brand in answers, because these systems weight corroborated, cross-referenced information more heavily than a single self-published claim.
Before writing a single piece of content, I map out who is already ranking in your space: direct competitors, adjacent tools solving part of the same problem, and the publishers and review sites your buyers trust. This surfaces the keywords they are ranking for that you are not, the content formats and angles that are working for them, the backlink sources they are earning links from, and, just as importantly, the gaps they have left open. Those gaps, topics nobody has covered well, questions nobody has answered clearly, comparisons nobody has been honest about, are often the fastest path to ranking for a new site, because you are not trying to outrank an established page, you are creating the first genuinely useful one.
Ranking traffic that does not convert is a vanity metric, not growth. Every page I optimise is built to satisfy search intent and move a visitor toward signing up, booking a call or starting a trial. That means title tags and meta descriptions written to earn the click, headings and page structure that match how people actually scan a page, clear and specific calls to action placed where intent peaks, and messaging that speaks to the same stage of awareness the target keyword implies. I treat on-page SEO and conversion rate optimisation as one discipline, not two separate workstreams, because for an early-stage startup every visitor matters and there is no room to rank well and convert poorly.
Every month you get a report that makes sense without an SEO background. Traffic trends, ranking movements, AI citation visibility, top and newly ranking pages, backlinks earned, and what is planned next, all explained in plain language with the "so what" spelled out rather than a wall of raw numbers. Clear enough to share directly with your co-founders, your team or your investors as part of a growth update, and specific enough that you always know exactly what was done, why, and what it is expected to deliver next.
SEO needs look completely different for a pre-launch product than for a Series A company with its own marketing hire. I tailor the scope, the deliverables and the pace of work to where you actually are, not a fixed template applied regardless of stage.
For teams still validating the product, this is SEO for pre-launch startups: getting the foundations right before a single user arrives. That means site architecture, technical setup, an initial keyword map and a small set of cornerstone pages ready to go live. The goal at this stage is not traffic yet, it is making sure launch day does not create a rebuild twelve months later.
Once you have real users or a validated audience, the focus shifts to niche keyword capture, the first wave of published content and the first round of backlinks. This is where the 90-day sprint does the most visible work: early rankings, qualified organic traffic and the first data on what content and keywords are actually converting for your specific product.
With more budget and a growing content engine, the strategy scales into more competitive keyword clusters, broader digital PR and link building, and deeper AI visibility work across your full page catalogue. A monthly retainer keeps pace with your expanding product surface, new markets and a content calendar that is now shipping every week rather than every month.
The SEO playbook for a SaaS product with a self-serve trial looks nothing like the playbook for an eCommerce brand or a two-sided marketplace. Keyword intent, content format and conversion goals all shift depending on what you are building. Here is where most of my startup work happens.
Startup SEO works best with the right kind of startup behind it. Here is an honest look at who gets the most out of this engagement, and who is better served elsewhere for now.
Startup SEO needs to move fast without cutting corners that will cost you later. Here is the process I use to get early traction and build something that lasts.
I start by assessing your site as it stands today, your top competitors and the keyword landscape in your space. This includes a full technical crawl, a review of your current content and site structure, and an AI visibility check covering whether AI crawlers can access your site, whether your content is structured for AI extraction, and whether your brand is already appearing in AI-generated answers for relevant searches. For pre-launch startups, this becomes a readiness review conducted against your staging site or planned sitemap, so you launch correctly from day one on both Google and AI search instead of retrofitting fixes after launch traffic has already been lost. You get a clear written report, not just a call, so the findings are something you can revisit and share internally.
Rather than a vague 12-month plan, I build a focused 90-day roadmap prioritised by impact and sequenced around your product and launch cycle. Quick wins, technical fixes, low-competition keyword pages and any AI crawlability issues, come first to build momentum and demonstrate traction within the first few weeks. Longer-term authority-building, larger content pieces and AI citation strategy run in parallel so month three is not a standing start. Each item on the roadmap is tied to a specific, understandable outcome, so you always know exactly what is being worked on, why it matters, and roughly when you should expect to see movement.
I implement the strategy quickly and treat it the same way your product team treats a feature: ship it, measure the results, learn from the data and refine. That means writing and publishing content, making the technical and structural changes agreed in the roadmap, running outreach for link building, and checking weekly whether early signals, indexing speed, initial ranking movement, click-through rate, are matching expectations. SEO for startups is not a slow and rigid twelve-month plan that only gets revisited at renewal. It is responsive, data-driven and built to adapt as your product, positioning and market evolve alongside it, which for most startups happens more often than any agency retainer accounts for.
Every month you receive a clear growth report covering keyword rankings, organic traffic trends, AI citation visibility, and leads or signups attributed to search where tracking allows it. The format is designed to be useful inside your business, not just for me to demonstrate activity: a short summary of what changed and why, the numbers behind it, and what is planned for the following month. You can drop it straight into an investor update, share it with your team as a genuine growth metric, or use it to decide whether it is time to expand the scope of work as your budget grows.
Startup budgets change month to month, so the engagement structure is built to flex with you rather than lock you into a number that made sense on day one but not on day ninety.
Every engagement begins with the SEO and AI visibility audit, a fixed-scope, fixed-cost project. This gives both of us a clear, shared view of where your site stands today and exactly what the highest-impact work would be, before any ongoing commitment is discussed.
From the audit, we scope a focused 90-day sprint targeting the priorities that matter most right now, technical fixes, initial content, foundational AI visibility work. Pricing is based on the scope of work agreed together, not a generic package, so you are only paying for what actually applies to your site.
Once the sprint has proven traction, most startups move to a monthly retainer that scales content volume, link building and reporting cadence alongside your growth and budget. There is no minimum term and no penalty for pausing or adjusting scope as your fundraising or revenue situation changes.
Exact figures depend on your site's current state, your market and how competitive your keyword landscape is, so I do not publish a fixed price list. The free strategy call includes a realistic estimate based on your specific situation before you commit to anything.
Most of the SEO damage I get called in to fix was avoidable. Here are the mistakes I see most often, and why they cost startups more time than the shortcut ever saved them.
Targeting terms like "project management software" as a brand-new site is a guaranteed way to spend months publishing content that never ranks. Ranking-page authority is earned progressively, starting with specific, lower-competition terms and working outward, not by aiming at the biggest keyword on day one.
Great content on a slow, poorly indexed or duplicate-content-riddled site will not rank, no matter how well it is written. Technical SEO is not a separate, optional workstream, it is the foundation everything else sits on. Skipping it is the single most common reason a content investment underperforms.
Some startups still view ChatGPT and AI Overviews citations as a nice-to-have layered on top of "real" SEO. In 2026 that framing is backwards. A meaningful share of research and comparison activity now happens inside AI tools before a user ever opens Google, and content that was never structured for extraction simply will not get cited, regardless of how well it ranks traditionally.
SEO compounds on a delay. Every month spent waiting for the "right time" is a month a competitor can use to build the rankings, backlinks and indexed history that get progressively harder to catch up to. The startups with the strongest organic channels almost always started earlier than felt comfortable, not once things had already scaled.
The cheapest SEO option is rarely the cheapest in the long run. Low-cost providers relying on templated content, bulk link buying or keyword stuffing can produce short-term movement that collapses, or actively damages your domain, once Google's algorithm catches up. Fit and methodology matter more than the hourly rate.
Platform migrations and full redesigns are one of the most common ways startups lose months of hard-earned rankings overnight, through broken redirects, changed URLs or accidentally deindexed pages. Any planned rebuild should have an SEO migration checklist attached to it well before development starts, not discovered as a problem after traffic has already dropped.
Yes. In 2026, your potential users and investors are researching solutions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, not just Google search. Getting your startup's site structured correctly for AI visibility from the start is far easier than retrofitting it later. Every engagement includes AI search visibility alongside standard Google optimisation.
Yes, and the earlier you start the better. Organic traffic is the most cost-effective acquisition channel available but it takes time to build. Every month you delay is a month your competitors can pull ahead. Even a small and focused investment in SEO at the pre-revenue stage creates compounding value that paid ads simply cannot replicate once you do have budget to spend.
I offer flexible, milestone-based engagements rather than fixed monthly retainers at fixed prices. We identify the highest-impact work first and focus all effort and spend there. As your startup grows and your budget expands, we scale the activity accordingly. You never pay for work that does not directly serve where you are right now.
Yes. Launch moments generate a spike in branded search and direct traffic that is a real opportunity to capture long-term SEO value. I can prepare your site, landing pages and content strategy in advance of a launch so that the traffic surge translates into rankings and authority that keep delivering after the launch hype fades.
Both. The keyword strategy, content angle and conversion focus differ significantly between B2B and B2C, and I tailor the approach accordingly. The technical and structural SEO fundamentals are the same, but how we target buyers versus end users and at what stage of their journey requires a completely different approach.
Typically within a week of our initial call. Once we have agreed on scope and priorities, I move quickly. There is no lengthy onboarding process or waiting for a project kickoff several weeks away. Startup timelines move fast and so do I.
Through a combination of leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators, indexed pages, keyword rankings, AI citations, tell us the work is on track well before traffic shows up in Google Analytics. Lagging indicators, organic traffic, signups, demo requests or sales attributed to organic search, tell us it is actually driving the business outcome you care about. I track both from day one so we are never guessing whether the engagement is working, and I connect reporting to whatever conversion events, signups, trials, demo bookings, already matter to your team.
Whichever your situation calls for. Many early-stage startups have no dedicated marketer yet, in which case I effectively act as your embedded SEO specialist, working directly with founders or whoever owns growth. If you already have a marketing hire or a content writer, I plug in alongside them, handling the technical, strategic and AI visibility work while collaborating with your team on execution, so you are not paying twice for overlapping skill sets.
We review what worked, what the data showed, and where the highest remaining opportunity sits. Most startups move into an ongoing monthly retainer at that point, scaled to their new budget and priorities, but there is no obligation to continue. If the sprint met its goals and you want to pause, take the work in-house, or revisit later, that is entirely your call. Nothing here is structured to lock you in past the point it is useful to you.
Either works. For many startups I handle strategy, briefs and either write or closely edit the content myself, particularly for pages where structure and search intent alignment matter most. If you have a founder or team member who understands the product deeply and can write, I will often provide detailed briefs and structural guidance and let them write in their own voice, since firsthand product knowledge is a genuine advantage in both Google's quality signals and AI citation likelihood. We agree on the right split during the roadmap stage.
Yes, and it is better to involve SEO before that migration than after. Site rebuilds and platform migrations are one of the most common ways startups accidentally lose months of organic rankings, through broken redirects, changed URL structures or lost content. If a rebuild or migration is on your roadmap, I build the SEO plan around it directly, including a migration checklist, so the transition protects the rankings and AI visibility we have already built rather than resetting them.
It depends on your current site, your market and how competitive your keywords are, so I do not publish a flat rate. What I can say is that engagements start with a fixed-cost audit, move into a scoped 90-day sprint priced around agreed deliverables, and only become an ongoing monthly retainer once you have decided the traction justifies it. You will never be asked to sign a large annual contract before seeing evidence the work is paying off.
Generative Engine Optimization, sometimes called GEO or LLM SEO, is the practice of structuring content so AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can extract and cite it accurately. It is essentially the same underlying discipline as the AI search visibility work included in every engagement here, just under a different name that has become more common in industry conversation. The techniques, clear entity definitions, extractable answers, corroborating third-party mentions, are the same regardless of which term you use for it.
Yes, where it is relevant. Not every startup needs local SEO, but for startups with a genuine regional or city-specific market, local landing pages, Google Business Profile optimisation and location-specific content are folded into the broader roadmap rather than treated as a separate product. If your startup is purely digital with no geographic tie, this typically is not part of the plan, since there is no reason to build for search intent your users do not have.
That is a common argument, and it holds some truth: SEO amplifies demand, it does not manufacture it, so pouring a large budget into content for a product nobody wants yet is a genuine waste. But there is a difference between full-scale content production and getting the foundations right. Technical setup, site architecture and a handful of validated, lower-competition keyword pages take relatively little investment and mean that when product-market fit does land, you are not starting your organic channel from zero. Waiting entirely until after fit is confirmed just pushes the compounding delay described earlier further down the timeline.
Book a free 30-minute strategy session. We will look at where your startup is right now and map out exactly how organic search and AI visibility can become reliable, scalable growth channels for you.
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