I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice I give out internally:

Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for.

Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags and exactly how many characters their headline or URL should be. Yes, you should make common-sense decisions about those things. But no amount of technical optimization is going to make people start Googling something that they couldn't care less about to begin with. Find out where demand exists for answering questions, and give the user a good experience as you answer those questions, and the search traffic will follow.

Here are some notes I made when I worked for a company that did very well in SEO. This was a few years ago now, so this might be horribly out of date now.

Hygiene factors

- Never expose an error page to Google. - Never expose an empty page. - Make sure all content is visible on first page load (e.g. not behind pop ups). - Show the same content to Google as to users. - Make sure all relevant content is in the HTML (not loaded dynamically). - Make sure page load times are good.

Keywords

- Research keywords you need to match. - Build database of search terms you wish to match, grow and improve this database over time. - Carefully curate pages, their URLs and metatags to match these keywords. - Use this database to choose which pages to expose to Google and make sure that all links and pages have the correct follow/nofollow attribute. - Steadily grow the content you expose to Google over time, keeping the quantity and quality of content on pages exposed to Google high.

Site structure and internal links

- Organise your site in a shallow tree structure. Top level pages should have many links to lower level pages. - All levels of the tree should have keyword rich content which is useful to users. - Not every level of the tree needs to be visible in the Google search results, it is mostly to make things easy for the crawler.

External links

- Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. - Do not generate fake backlinks, if Google thinks you are doing this they will give you a severe penalty.

Submit your sitemap

- Submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools and make sure it is kept up to date at least weekly.

Bounce rate

- Carefully monitor your bounce rate and time on site for users coming from Google as these are key factors in Google rankings.

Click through rate

- Use descriptive and relevant titles and metatags to improve the click through rate from the Google search results to your site. - PR, social media, advertising and other channels can improve brand awareness that in turn improves click through rate. - Regularly check a selection of searches that you rank on to assess the quality of your Google search listings.

From personal experience: Yes, correct markup and h1 tags etc (“On-Page SEO“) all matter. Set everything up correctly, that should take your frontend dev a couple days at most for a small to medium site. But that will do almost nothing unless it’s coupled with loads of backlinks. Get a tool like ahrefs or semrush (they’re expensive because they’re good, but a one-week trial is enough to take a look around in the beginning). There you can then see how many backlinks your competitors have and track your own rankings. Concentrate on 1-2 keywords in the beginning and fill your site with well-written content for those keywords, interlink everything on your own site, and then go get backlinks. Yes, you can buy backlinks on Fiver, but those are terrible and will probably do more harm than good. Make something good and get people to write about it.

It is definitely not free.

But the answer is, as always: it depends.

A good way to start is RTFM. Google has many guides on how to optimize your website for their indexing service.

Create content relevant to what your startup does. Answer relevant questions that real people search for. You can do some keyword research and use tools such as Autocomplete and People Also Ask to get some questions to start with.

Answer these questions the best you can. In-depth, clear, easy to understand. Make it informative, make it educational, make it look nice. The focus is on providing the best value possible to the person who is asking the question.

Review the posts that currently rank on the first page of Google for these searches. What topics do they talk about? What issues do they solve? And then try to create something that's better, more practical, easier to understand, presented in a better way... than what you've found on the first page.

It will take some time and effort of regularly posting quality articles before you start seeing the results but this is a more trusted and more self-sustainable way of driving traffic and leads to your startup.

>SEO is still one of the few free ways to get customers.

If you have to hire and manage a team of content writers it's not that free.

Forget an overarching strategy. You don't have the bandwidth for it as a small startup.

As a start, just find 3-5 core keywords that aren't insanely competitive. Write the best possible content you can on these keywords. Promote them like hell - guest posts, forums, heck even HN. Don't just look for links; get actual people to read your content.

This alone can move the needle for small startups. A trickle of high quality leads can give you the confidence to invest more in content and SEO

You can only control your own content while following Google guidelines, so state-of-the-art, world class content will however & pretty always be your best shot?

Curious to know why you think SEO is free? Someone has to write the content, right?

The best guides out there are the ones from HubSpot.

Check out SEO guides by Backlinko - some of the best stuff I've read.