Does a startup need SEO? A straight answer by stage

SEO is slow and compounding. Discovery and indexing take days to weeks for a new site, and ranking on anything competitive takes months; Google itself has said the benefit of SEO work shows over four months to a year. That shape decides everything about when it is worth your time.

Some products do not have a search problem. Writing forty guides for them is a year spent on the wrong thing, and no amount of technique fixes it.

• Nobody searches for what you do, because the category has no name yet. You will be inventing demand, which advertising and community do better.
• The buyers do not search at work. Some roles buy entirely through peers, procurement or conferences.
• You need revenue in six weeks. SEO will not arrive in time; sell directly.
• The whole market is a handful of accounts. Ten named companies are a list, not a search channel.
• You cannot write, will not hire, and will not use help. SEO without pages is just technical housekeeping.

Whatever stage you are at, this is twenty minutes and it never expires. It costs nothing and it means that when you do start, the clock has already been running.

1. 1

   Verify the site in Search Console

   A domain property, verified with a DNS record. It shows nothing until Google has crawled, and it holds sixteen months of history once it starts. Verifying late means you cannot see what happened before.

2. 2

   Make sure nothing blocks indexing

   Check robots.txt and the meta robots tag on a live page. A noindex shipped from staging is the single most common reason a new site is invisible.

3. 3

   Give the home page a real title

   What the product does and for whom, in about sixty characters. Not the brand name alone, which nobody is searching yet.

4. 4

   Publish a sitemap and one page per thing you sell

   Pricing, the product, what it integrates with. These are the pages people search for by name once they hear about you.

5. 5

   Get one real link

   From a profile you control, a launch listing, a partner. Google finds new sites through links; with none, discovery is slow.

That is the whole minimum. Everything else can wait until you know what your buyers type.

The cost of waiting is not a penalty, it is time. Two specific things are lost, and both are recoverable except for the months.

• The compounding: pages published a year ago are the ones ranking today. Starting a year later means the first results arrive a year later.
• The history: Search Console shows what Google already had for a verified property, so verifying today does not give you last year's diagnostics.
• Not lost: the domain's age as a ranking advantage. Google has said there is no bonus for age itself, and there is no confirmed sandbox.
• Not lost: the pages you would have written. Writing them now works exactly as well as writing them then, just later.

So the honest framing is this: starting late is expensive in months, cheap in everything else. Starting too early is expensive in months too, because you write the wrong pages and rewrite them.

Three questions. If the answer to all three is yes, start. If not, do the twenty minute setup and come back when they are.

1. Can you name three searches a buyer of yours would make, in their words rather than yours? If not, you need conversations, not pages.
2. Do you have three hours a month you will actually protect for this? Not could, will.
3. Can you wait six months before judging it? If the company needs revenue sooner, sell first and write later.

One honest note about this page: we sell a report that reads your site and the searches around it, so we have an interest in you saying yes. The answer above is still no for a product with no users, and doing the setup and coming back in six months costs you nothing.