New startup? 5 quick tips to avoid killing your SEO before you’ve even started

If you’re planning for your new startup to be in it for the long haul, SEO is probably somewhere on your list. Maybe for a rainy day?

Here's 5 simple ways to avoid a painful time later on.

A lot of SEO is nuanced and complicated, but trust me, you won’t go far wrong if you just blindly follow this advice (even if you don’t fully get it):

1. Will you have a thriving blog eventually? Put it on a subfolder instead of a subdomain

❌ Subdomain: blog.yoursite.com
✔️ Subfolder: yoursite.com/blog

I won’t bore you with why. But if you have a choice, a subfolder wins every time.

If you don’t believe me:

Click: https://twitter.com/ItsHogg/status/1252629597650329601

2. Make sure the words on your page are visible in View Source

I’m all for fancy front ends written in the latest fork of React that saves you 5% of dev time. Cool AF. Just make sure the actual content of your pages is there for Google.

Right click > View Source and Ctrl-F the first few words on your page. If you see them then you’re probably golden.

Google is pretty good at rendering Javascript-loaded content in a lot of conditions, but there’s plenty more conditions where they just give up.

3. Beg, borrow or steal (but don’t buy) your first 10 links

Goal number one of your startup’s SEO is to rank for your own name.

Unless you have a super-unique string of letters as your domain name then you can forget seeing yourself there when Googling your brand in the short term. It might take months or even years to show on it’s own (ask me for proof in the comments).

But just a small handful of links to your site from around the web will shorten that time frame to a couple of months, or even weeks.

Ideas:

• Ask friends with sites for a link
• Let other sites review your product for free. They'd be silly not to link back to the thing they're reviewing.
• Give a testimonial to a service you use.

Just let Google know that you’re not the only person that cares about your site

4. But before that, choose your name wisely

Before you settle on a name for your site, make sure you check what you’re up against. Google your potential name and see what shows.

• Do you see any big brands there? Avoid.
• Is Google trying to correct your spelling? Avoid.
• Do you see a local map? Google thinks you're looking for results near you. Avoid. It’s going to take a lot of effort to persuade Google they’re wrong and they should rank you instead. Just swerve that headache from the start.

If you see a set of random, confused, we're-not-sure-what-you-want results then bingo.

5. SEO is mostly about answering questions

People are searching for stuff and you're trying to give them the answer on one of your pages. That's kind of it.

The complicated stuff you'll read when you go down the SEO rabbit hole is all in some way trying to support that simple fact, and you can ignore 90% of it.

So, a really quick getting started guide to actively doing SEO:

• Name your important pages something similar to how you'd search for them. Clarity beats cleverness.
• What problems is your product or service solving? Just write each problem as the title of a page and answer it in the body. The thing you're selling will naturally be one of the solutions, and a small small percentage of people will buy your thing. Rinse and repeat.

Hope you found that useful. Thanks for reading.