What Your Startup Can Achieve in the First Year of SEO Strategy?

Hordes of visitors crazy about your product...

Analytics charts that just shoot through the roof...  

Enough signups to basically burn your servers...

And money. So much money...

Indeed, we all have big dreams and expectations for SEO.

(Don't get me wrong, they do come true. They really do. It's just that it most likely will not happen in the first year of running the SEO strategy.)

I know. I've been there, too.  I had all the same wild notions in my first SEO job. I'm a bit ashamed about it now, but I did.

I just landed a junior job at a small SEO agency. We were a team of two. My boss won this amazing new contract with a startup and brought me in to help.

I remember going into this job imaging all the crazy results we'll be delivering to them... Think of your wildest business dreams, and you'll know what I mean (and yes, that includes generating millions in revenue, and all...)

Of course, that didn't happen...not in that first year anyway.

But also, and this is the important bit: Nobody was expecting it. Not those ridiculous results anyway.

That was the biggest shock for me.

Naturally, these guys were far more experienced in business than me. They knew that the first year of SEO is not to reap rewards but to build a strong foundation for that to happen ... later.

As a result, they didn't pressure us to deliver any insane results in that first year.

Yet so many startups today think the exact opposite.

They launch SEO with the wrong notion about what to expect and when. Unfortunately, it's never pleasant when the reality comes crashing on them...

So, below, I thought I'd share some of my experiences on the topic and tell you specifically what you should expect in the first year of running an SEO program.

And let's start with a 10000 foot view...

The three stages of Startup SEO

Usually, when we think of startup SEO, we imagine a long, practically never-ending, drudging process.

Well, that's not entirely true.

Sure, I agree with it being long. It makes sense to think of the process as continuous, too. But it is not never-ending or lacking structure.

In fact, not only does it have a well-defined structure, it also follows a three stage lifecycle: Foundation, Scaling, and Maturity.

Foundation (year 1)

The first stage is exactly that... the beginning.

This is when you lay the foundation for the program, create your initial(*) strategy, and ensure that everything is good to go for your startup to compete for rankings and clicks.

You do get some results during that time. However, often, these aren't what you plan to get with SEO in the end.

Your site does begin to rank, and once it reaches topical authority, it might start ranking relatively well.

Your traffic goes up, too.

Finally, you start seeing initial startups. Although, that often happens closer to the end of that stage.

But the real wins during this time are different (and unfortunately, often not as tangible as money):

• Establishing your startup in the correct category. This results in your pages beginning to appear relatively well in the SERP for queries relating to your core topics.
• Building the body of work that will allow you to rank well, and attract those hordes of visitors later. And look, there is no rankings or traffic without this content. So, drudging as this stage might seem, it is beyond necessary to complete.

In other words, during this stage, your SEO isn't working yet. You're building it up so that it can become the primary pillar of your growth.

(*) The reason why I said initial isn't just because it's your well, first attempt at building a roadmap for your SEO program.

I called it initial* also because at this stage, much of the strategy is based on guesses and gut feeling.

I like to think about it as the initial plan based on what you (and your SEO consultant) consider to be true about your audience and their search behavior. Later, as the SEO program delivers various performance data, you will be able to refine it, and create a strategy that matches your audience's preference far better.  

Scaling (years 2-3, typically)

With the groundwork done, you are ready to scale and strengthen your position in search.

Before I tell you how that works, let's see where you are at this stage, typically:

• First of all, you have achieved a relatively good authority in your space (TIP: You can measure that using different metrics like Domain Authority or Authority Score. Just please use one metric only, and compare yourself to the competition using the same metric!) Sure, it does not yet match what your top competitors have  but it's close enough to allow your content to rank, and often even outrank them.
• You also developed a relatively big body of content. All these pages rank and deliver good traffic already, although, as you can imagine, their performance could be better.
• You're seeing actual returns from the SEO program - signups, sales, etc. (Note - You'd be getting those in the first year, too, albeit at much lower scale. During this stage, you usually see real results, and start seeing real money coming in.)
• And you have plenty of data to make more informed SEO decisions, and plenty more content to create.

This stage, therefore is about two things: strengthening your position and improving the results and expanding your visibility to achieve even greater search visibility.

During this stage, your focus will be divided between getting new pages up, and slowly pushing your existing content higher and higher in SERPs.

In practical terms, this is when you continue adding more pages, but also:

• optimize the hell out of the content you have already,
• build links to pages that need this additional boost,
• work on improving your UX to increase engagement, and so on.

On average, this stage lasts about two years. Naturally, this is only an approximation, and your  timeline might be different. But overall, if you assume two years for this stage, you're not going to be far off.

Maturing (years 4 and beyond)

Many SEOs don't like you to know this but there comes a time when you have almost all the work on SEO done.  

It doesn't mean that you no longer need to work on SEO.

No, not at all.

But you no longer have to do that big push to make the channel work.

At this stage, you've created content to cover most of your keywords. This content performs quite well, and you are getting solid results from the program: signups, sales, etc.

As a result, you no longer have long lists of keywords to target. Sure, you can come up with hundreds of topics sort-of related to your product or industry. But in most cases, they wouldn't be absolutely necessary to have.

So, what's left to do?

First of all, you need to maintain your results. It might not require constant work, but I should continue monitoring the performance, and improving whatever might need it

You also need to monitor for potential algorithm changes that might affect your performance negatively.

WORTH NOTING: Being hit by an algorithmic update does not mean a penalty.  It just means that Google has change the way it processes queries or ranking signals, and you might need to tweak your content to match that.

Finally, this is when you can start looking for new opportunities to boost search performance. This might mean closing gaps between you and the competition, targeting new audiences (or smaller subsegments of your existing audience,) and so on.

In this guide, we're focusing on the first stage so, let's look at it in close detail...

So, what exactly happens in the first year of the SEO strategy?

Most startups' situation (when it comes to SEO and growth, in general, of course) could be summarized with a simple statement:

There's nothing there yet.

They've no authority, no traffic bar occasional spikes here and there (usually after some online mention, like Product Hunt or so,) nothing...

It's not a bad thing, by the way. It's actually impossible for it to be any different at the start.

So, naturally, the first steps in any marketing strategy, SEO included, will revolve around planning and building the foundation for the growth to come.

This is how it happens with SEO:

Planning, audience research, etc.

First weeks, if not months, of the strategy are dedicated solely to planning.

• Usually, you start by understanding the opportunity.

• You also evaluate the competition, and try to understand the companies you're going to be going against.
• You research the audience. You probably already know a lot about them - their problems, pain points, interests, etc. But you also need to learn about their search behavior:  
  • what information they search for online (and that might be different from their other interests,)
  • how they do it, and
  • how that information relates to your product.
• Finally, this is the time to set realistic goals for the program. Now, I always recommend setting goals that can be achieved within a year given your current situation, the market, the opportunity. I admit that it's not a popular approach. "Increase signups" sounds like a far more exciting goal than "establish the site within the right category and get 30 pages rankings as close to page one as possible." Unfortunately, though, it's the former that's more realistic for the first year...

SEO research (topics, keywords, competitors, etc.)

Once you understand the situation and the audience, you can start researching the actual search landscape.

But (and this is important) there is more to this than just keyword research.

In fact, you conduct this research with two objectives in mind:

1. To fully understand the complete search visibility you could achieve. I like to think of this as all the conversations relating to products like mine that my potential customers have and I could join with content and SEO. In other words, it's the  complete world that you could conquer - all the topics, keywords, queries, etc. that you could be ranking for.
2. To build an actionable plan of what you absolutely must achieve. In practical terms, this means evaluating all those long lists of topics and keywords for commercial potential, and creating a target keyword list.

Roadmapping

SEO roadmap is exactly this - An actionable plan showing what you should be working on every month, quarter, or sprint.

I like to break my roadmaps into 3-month sprints and cover at least 12-months of work.

Given the usual SEO timelines, a year is a good stretch of time to work towards specific goals.

[IMAGE]

Note, road mapping is by far the shortest part of the planning and strategizing stage of SEO. If you've done the research right, finalizing the roadmap can take anything from one to a couple of hours. But it's a hugely important aspect. It's what turns all the research and planning into an actual project.  

Website optimization

Most of the time, when founders hear the term - website optimization - they think meta tags, headings, etc.

But that's just a tiny part of the whole process. Optimizing a website (remember - we're talking about a startup site, not an established one) involves:

• Improving the technology. Often, that means moving the site to a CMS or at least, building a process that would allow the SEO to edit various elements of the site, when needed.
• Building up the taxonomy to support the program. Most startup websites are tiny, and there's a huge opportunity in expanding them, adding more pages to fully communicate what the product is, does, and to boost the overall authority of the site.
• Improving other technical aspects, and ensuring that nothing's going to prevent the site from achieving its full SEO potential.
• Working on-page SEO. This is where you work on meta tags, and other on-page elements. And in most cases, this work does not revolve around tweaking on-page SEO but rather, implementing the best practices - ensuring the right headings are used in blog archive, post template, etc. and across static pages of the site. Ensuring that templates support all core on-page elements, and so on.
• You usually also need to create additional templates to facilitate the content to come. Most startup sites have at least some facility to add blog content. But there is far more to SEO than articles, and you might need to create templates for pages like competitor comparisons, keyword-driven landing pages, etc.
• Finally, you might need to set up tools and analytics to measure the campaign (and the website's) performance - Add the site to Google Search Console and analytics platform, set up rank tracker, etc.

Launching the content production

Content production is usually the longest (and biggest) part of the entire strategy.

It's when you (finally) begin to build content assets that will allow your site to rank for relevant queries. And build them you must. After all, it's the content that Google will rank in the SERP.

But this is also a slow process that you're launching in the first year but it usually runs for much longer.

For one, depending on your team and capabilities, you might be able to publish a handful of pages a month. You might (and even should) start slow, and understand the market, the competition, etc. before you commit to publishing content at scale.

So, it will take time to get through the entire content calendar.

It's also a process that should happen strategically. I recommend starting with commercial, BoFU, content and slowly working your way towards informational topics.

The reason for that is simple - Given how long it takes for new pages to settle in SERP and achieve their maximum search potential, the earlier you get commercial stuff out, the quicker it will start working for you.  

Nonetheless, you will spend much of year one publishing content and watching it slowly climb up in rankings.

But, and I know that I am repeating myself, you will not see any major significant results in that first year.

(Naturally, that also depends on your situation right now, current authority, etc. But I always advise new startups to assume that there won't be any major breakthroughs in their analytics in the first twelve months. )    

‍