SEO for startups: what to do first

What order should startup SEO go in?

Three steps, and each one needs the one before it. Google and AI have to know you exist before anyone can recommend you. A page Google hasn’t indexed can’t rank, and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode only use pages that are indexed and eligible to show with a snippet.

How do you get a new site indexed?

This part is small jobs, not a project. Google says it can take a few weeks to notice a new site, so start the clock now.

1. Verify your site in Google Search ConsoleIt’s free, and it’s where Google tells you which pages it kept and which it skipped.
2. Submit a sitemapIt helps Google find your URLs, though it doesn’t promise to index them. Small sites may not need one. It’s cheap, so add it anyway.
3. Link every new page from a page Google already keepsGoogle finds new pages by following links from pages it knows. A page nothing links to just waits.
4. Request indexing for your most important pagesUse URL Inspection in Search Console. A request guarantees nothing, and Google says crawling can take a few days to a few weeks. For more than a handful of pages, rely on the sitemap.
5. Add your site to Bing and send IndexNow pingsIndexNow tells Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep that a page changed. Google doesn’t use it.
6. Let AI crawlers inCheck your robots.txt. If it blocks OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI says your pages won’t show in ChatGPT search answers.

Then open the Page indexing report. “Discovered - currently not indexed” means Google found the URL but hasn’t crawled it yet. “Crawled - currently not indexed” means it read the page and chose not to keep it, which Google calls common and not always a problem. On a new site, try two fixes first: more links pointing to the page, and more on it worth reading.

Which pages should a startup write first?

The pages people search while they’re choosing. Write them before any blog post: “[competitor] alternatives”, “[you] vs. [competitor]”, a “best [category] tools” list with you on it, your pricing, and a page for each job your product does. These searches are small, but the person typing them is picking a tool.

Volume is the wrong filter for a new site. In Ahrefs’ studies, only 1.74% of newly published pages reached Google’s top 10 within a year, and 96.55% of the pages in its index get no Google traffic at all. Spend your few pages on searches where your product is a real fit. PostHog makes the same call: start with comparison, integration and best-of pages.

What did our clients publish before AI started naming them?

One AI answer tells you almost nothing: the same question can name you in one run and skip you in the next. Ask your buyer questions over many runs and count how often you’re named. Here’s that count for six clients on our Results page.

In 5 of the 6, the change we marked was a comparison, an alternatives page or a list: KnowBe4 and Proofpoint comparison pages for Tartan, a Retell AI alternatives page for Callingly, a list of the best Etsy bulk listing tools for Listadum, an Elevate vs. BrainHQ comparison for The Mind Company, and a list of cloud providers with no egress fees for American Cloud. The sixth, DocsAutomator, was a rewrite of one use-case page.

Other changes shipped to each site in those same weeks, so this is timing, not proof of cause. They’re still the first pages we’d write.

What can wait until you have traction?

PostHog says investing in SEO as early as possible “is half right”, and that you should focus on the basics until you have product-market fit. Fair. We’d count indexing and your comparison pages as the basics. What waits is volume: the big blog program, broad high-volume searches and link campaigns. Pages written for a pitch you’re about to change just get rewritten.

Special files for Google can wait too. Google says you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Who should do the work, and what does it cost?

• Have it done for youThat’s us. We do AI visibility and SEO for 30+ software companies, $2,000 a month. Real changes ship to your site every day, and we check each one before it goes live. See pricing.
• Do it yourselfIt costs your hours, every week. The tools in this guide are free, but the pages above don’t write themselves.
• Hire freelancersFreelancers cost about $8,000 a month for the full plan, and someone on your team still has to run them.
• Hire an SEO agencyThe full plan costs about $25,000 a month at an SEO agency. Here’s how we compare.