A well executed SEO strategy can reduce customer acquisition costs by 60%. Here’s how.

In collaboration with Prashant Puri, CEO and co-founder, AdLift.

Though there are more ways to communicate with each other today than at any other point in human history, it’s harder than ever for startup founders to get their message out effectively. For many early stage companies, this means SEO — or search engine optimization — is a top priority. But given where we are as 2022 draws to a close, with economic uncertainty looming large on the global stage, these same companies are looking to do more with less. 

According to Prashant Puri, CEO and co-founder of the SEO agency AdLift, these two priorities aren’t in conflict. Rather, they go hand-in-hand. I first heard Prashant speak at a conference in Seattle, where he caught my attention by discussing data driven SEO and content strategies intended to reduce customer acquisition cost. Zoning in on SEO, he says, is one of the most impactful ways to reduce cost across the board. 

Before founding AdLift in 2009, Prashant ran SEO and search marketing for giants like eBay, AT&T and Yahoo. Today, he specializes in helping companies of all sizes transform their SEO, paid search and content generation strategies. I sat down with Prashant for more insight into what programs and approaches should be top of mind for startup leaders at the early stages. 

Let’s jump right in. Why should SEO be such a high priority for startups right from the beginning? 

This is a data point we hammer home as often as we can to clients — well executed SEO has a high propensity for reducing customer acquisition costs. We analyzed about 100 brands that we work with and mapped the data back across percentage of paid search versus percentage of SEO traffic. At the very minimum, your SEO should be driving the same amount of traffic as your paid search. But companies that invested in significantly increasing SEO traffic over paid search saw their customer acquisition cost drop by around 60 percent. For any company, that’s huge. For a startup pouring money into early customer acquisition, it can alter the entire course of the business. 

For startup leaders who are completely unfamiliar with SEO, where should they start? What foundational pieces need to be in place to get this right from the starting line? 

The first priority has to be a demonstrable understanding of your target audience. What is the sweet spot? What are they searching for, and which keywords do they search most often? There are a number of tools that can provide this information, like Google or SEMRush, but it’s imperative to figure out both your search volume and what the customers are looking for at the outset. From there, you can start to develop content and landing or product pages around those keywords, and begin to understand where your product best fits within the larger story being told. 

Most companies will then start to move into technical SEO — how does Google crawl your website? Have you crossed all the T’s and dotted the I’s, have you gotten rid of any errors on your pages? Page load time and page speed are absolutely critical. About a year and a half ago Google launched what they call “core web vitals,” which provide more information around page load time and how to optimize for that. Nothing kills website traffic like unwanted downtime. 

When do you start looking beyond your own content to see what other entities or competitors are contributing to the conversation? 

Once the technical foundation is built, you’ll move on to working on comparative analysis. For example, if I am brand A and am competing with brands B, C and D, how much traffic is each of us driving? This will help you benchmark against like sized competitors, and allow you to see how much share of voice you’re driving comparatively. We can then go even deeper, and use more advanced SEO techniques to analyze that data and dive into why Brand B is driving more traffic than Brand A. Typically what we see is that Brand B has more and more relevant content, and so we adjust accordingly. 

What do those adjustments look like? 

If we know we have the right content on our own pages, we move into more advanced SEO initiatives like interlinking. It’s critical to link each piece of content to another. Typically we see companies use MarTech platforms to execute these initiatives at scale. 

Finally, you want to drive link backs of content marketing on third party sites. About 55 percent of Google’s algorithm is based on your website content, and the other 45 percent is based on what others are saying about you. That means you need others creating content about the product or services you want to sell. If it’s sunglasses, for example, you want to create content on third party websites that talk about summer wear or fashion or outdoor activities that then links back to your product pages. 

This is where AdLift’s platform really delivers massive value. We have close to 20K publishers on our platform that can create content at scale and syndicate it back to specific landing pages. 

How quickly should a startup start to see results? How do they know whether they’ve got the right strategy in place, of if they need to adjust? 

Typically, when we work with startups we typically find that within the first three to four months we see results on traffic and keyword ranking. It really depends on the stage of the company. Are they driving less than 2% share of voice, or is it in the 10-15% range already? Depending on where they are, we start to see improvements on ranking and non-branded traffic. In most cases, SEO traffic converts higher than any other channel and has the highest ROI. That’s when clients will ask us how they can further scale that efficiency. Increasing the number of backlinks coming into your website, and the number of third party authorities talking about you, is where we can really leverage the AdLift platform to create more content for clients across more online real estate.

What does ongoing maintenance look like for a strong SEO program? 

All of this is ongoing — everything has to be maintained on a regular basis. Competitive analysis should be conducted quarterly. Are your competitors creating new pages? What kind of traffic are they driving? Why? Are we creating new pages, and optimizing for the same things? Publishing content on third party sites is also ongoing. 

Many people think of SEO as a one-time investment but that’s just not the way it works. It’s something that has to be iterated on time and time again, something that has to remain dynamic and evolving and fresh. Somewhere else somewhere is creating fresh content, and Google is always going to prioritize fresh content in its rankings. 

When should a startup make its first dedicated, in-house SEO hire? 

I would say when you are somewhere between series B and C, it’s time to start building an in-house team with SEO capabilities. An SEO manager or director should be your first internal hire. Before that, from pre-funding through series B, an agency model simply works better given the breadth of their expertise and the cost economics.