Should your early-stage start-up invest in SEO? 4 questions to address

Over the years, I’ve helped many early-stage startups gain traction through SEO campaigns, and I know many Search Engine Land readers have done the same with PPC. 

Often, restrictions on budget and/or staff resources mean you can’t take on both types of campaigns at once – you’ll have to pick one.

I’m reminded of this a couple of times a week by folks reaching out to me personally or on Slack groups or other forums to ask whether they should invest in SEO (or paid) in the very earliest stages of launch.

Without more information to go on, there’s a series of questions I ask to help guide them to the right answer:

• Do you need results now, or can you afford to be patient and build a foundation of steady growth?
• Do you know your market and your ideal customer inside and out? 
• What does your list of target keywords look like?
• How good (or bad) is your website?

Let’s look at possible answers to those questions – and how they should dictate your priorities.

1. What’s more important: fast or steady?

I bet you know where I’m going with this: if you need immediate revenue, PPC is a much better play than SEO (assuming you have a good PPC strategy). But the old caveat applies: PPC is ephemeral. You spend for every single click, over and over.

With SEO, of course, you’re building a foundation for growth that takes (best-case scenario) weeks to months to start seeing momentum, at least on Google.

(Note: You can and should diversify your bets and include platforms like TikTok, Reddit and Quora in your organic strategy, especially since content there can produce more immediate engagement.) 

My usual pitch to brands mulling whether or not to invest early in SEO is three-fold:

• Building an SEO baseline early on helps improve all your digital marketing initiatives (content, website architecture, site speed, conversion optimization) and develop a starting point of repeatable “free” traffic to your site. 
• SEO thrives on education and content, which are key for early-stage growth (you need to introduce yourself to people, after all, and start-ups often need to educate users on why they need an innovative new product or service. 
• SEO has compounding benefits that grow with time. When you start ranking on one keyword or building expertise for a certain category, it makes it easier to rank for the next keyword, so getting started early is better. 

2. How well do you know your market and your ICP?

If you are certain you know your market cold (i.e., the competitors, the CPCs/CPMs, your company’s specific differentiators and why and to whom they matter), then there might be a little less of a case to be made for diving immediately into SEO. (Although you’d better be creating content that educates users on your differentiators.)

One of the big benefits of SEO is developing your position in the market, helping users understand who you are and how you fit in. You’re also establishing a nuanced feedback loop on what you might get wrong about the market and your most valuable users.

Both SEO and paid search will return data on things like:

• Low impressions/CTR (your content isn’t resonating).
• Time on page (your content’s not what the user is looking for).
• Conversion rate (you’ve got the wrong offer for this funnel stage).
• And more. 

The difference is that SEO doesn’t require you to pay for empty clicks/CPMs to find this out.

If you don’t need to invest in that kind of research, then great. But if you sense there’s more for you to learn about your marketplace, it’s not the right time to run a lot of paid campaigns.

3. How precise are your keywords?

Trust me (or pretty much any paid search pro worth their salt): you do not want to rely on broad keywords and/or Performance Max or other AI-fueled bidding and targeting algorithms to get ROAS-friendly revenue.

If you have a few exact keywords with decent search volume and intent in mind and the right offer, put some money behind paid campaigns. 

Those keywords might also be great to tackle on the SEO front, but SEO isn’t all about a good keyword strategy.

Today, search algorithms incorporate natural language, context, topic authority, intent, semantic relevance, etc. In other words, a few pages stuffed with mentions of that exact keyword won’t do the trick.

Suppose you’re more concerned about engaging your customer on a variety of related topics and building authority in your field than you are about owning specific keywords. In that case, SEO is a great place to start.

4. How good (or bad) is your website?

Remember my point about how SEO will force you to tackle your marketing more holistically?

If your website is slow, cluttered, confusing, unattractive or not optimized for mobile, and you need short to mid-term growth, focus on creating a few PPC-friendly landing pages for your campaigns. Put a ton of resources into cleaning up your website before you start developing valuable content. 

If your website is fast, intuitive and easy to navigate, you have a fantastic base for content-driven growth. This should definitely be a consideration when you’re weighing how to leverage your resources.

Deciding between SEO and paid search for your startup

There are more factors to consider, such as burn rate/available funds, team strengths and the competition/CPC levels of your focus keywords. Dig into that next layer if you don’t have a clear direction after assessing your answers to the questions above. 

If you’re still on the fence, pick one and go with it. But before you do that, make sure you have a plan to measure the results, gauge your campaigns’ success (or failure) and pivot if needed.