How to start SEO
Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2025 9:54 am
Here are some straightforward starting points for your SEO strategy:
1. Fix obvious technical SEO problems
Before you spend time or money on content creation or link building, make sure your technical SEO is sound. You can check for most common technical SEO problems with a free AWT account.
Here are some of the technical SEO issues on the Ahrefs blog. They’re prioritized by likely importance: blue items are notices, yellow items are warnings, and red items are errors:
Top issues
As a priority, make sure your website is accessible to crawlers and your pages are allowed to be indexed by Google.
Further reading
We Studied Over 1 Million Domains to Find the Most Common veterinary email list Technical SEO Issues
2. Get your first few links from your network.
In the early days of SEO, earning a few relevant backlinks can make a huge improvement to SEO performance.
Link-building often feels like it’s outside your locus of control, but there are plenty of ways to predictably build good links. In the long term, creating content will make it easier to acquire backlinks. In the short term, you can use your network to get started:
Get listed on your investors’ portfolio pages
Ask integration partners to link to your website
Launch on Product Hunt
Appear on podcasts
Ask other founder friends if you can contribute to their blog
In the beginning, it’s a good idea to prioritise relevant links; over time, you can consider extra factors like domain rating.
Further reading
How to Get your First 100 Backlinks
3. Find your competitor’s best pages (and copy them)
Start making content by finding the pages that are driving the most organic traffic for your competitors, and creating your own (better) versions.
You can find these pages in Ahrefs using the Top Pages report. Here’s a list of Ramp’s most popular blog articles, ordered by estimated organic traffic:
URLs
If I competed with Ramp, I would consider publishing my own articles targeting some of these keywords—like this guide to the easiest business credit cards to get, generating an esteemed 2,157 visits from organic search each month.
You can also see any website’s most linked-to pages using the Best by links report. Here, Ramp’s guide about how to apply for a business credit card has earned 211 backlinks from 99 different websites:
target page
If we created a similar guide, there’s a good likelihood we could earn links with it too.
1. Fix obvious technical SEO problems
Before you spend time or money on content creation or link building, make sure your technical SEO is sound. You can check for most common technical SEO problems with a free AWT account.
Here are some of the technical SEO issues on the Ahrefs blog. They’re prioritized by likely importance: blue items are notices, yellow items are warnings, and red items are errors:
Top issues
As a priority, make sure your website is accessible to crawlers and your pages are allowed to be indexed by Google.
Further reading
We Studied Over 1 Million Domains to Find the Most Common veterinary email list Technical SEO Issues
2. Get your first few links from your network.
In the early days of SEO, earning a few relevant backlinks can make a huge improvement to SEO performance.
Link-building often feels like it’s outside your locus of control, but there are plenty of ways to predictably build good links. In the long term, creating content will make it easier to acquire backlinks. In the short term, you can use your network to get started:
Get listed on your investors’ portfolio pages
Ask integration partners to link to your website
Launch on Product Hunt
Appear on podcasts
Ask other founder friends if you can contribute to their blog
In the beginning, it’s a good idea to prioritise relevant links; over time, you can consider extra factors like domain rating.
Further reading
How to Get your First 100 Backlinks
3. Find your competitor’s best pages (and copy them)
Start making content by finding the pages that are driving the most organic traffic for your competitors, and creating your own (better) versions.
You can find these pages in Ahrefs using the Top Pages report. Here’s a list of Ramp’s most popular blog articles, ordered by estimated organic traffic:
URLs
If I competed with Ramp, I would consider publishing my own articles targeting some of these keywords—like this guide to the easiest business credit cards to get, generating an esteemed 2,157 visits from organic search each month.
You can also see any website’s most linked-to pages using the Best by links report. Here, Ramp’s guide about how to apply for a business credit card has earned 211 backlinks from 99 different websites:
target page
If we created a similar guide, there’s a good likelihood we could earn links with it too.