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Key Takeaways
When founders ask me how they should begin with SEO, they often expect me to name a specific tool. But in most cases, the tool is not what’s holding them back. The real issue is the order of operations.
Over the last several years, my agency has continued to sharpen the same full-cycle SEO system — the process we now apply with every new client and teach internally through an eight-module training program. It works because each step builds on the one before it. Most founders struggle with SEO not because they ignore the work entirely, but because they tackle it out of sequence: publishing content before keyword research, pursuing backlinks before resolving crawl issues and chasing pageviews before deciding which visitors actually matter to the business.
Below is the 10-step framework I use, exactly in the order I use it. With two free tools and a few focused weekends, founders can put much of it into practice on their own.
1. Start with niche research, not keyword research
Before entering even one seed keyword, get clear on where your company has a legitimate chance to compete. A skincare company selling to dermatologists should not start by targeting “best moisturizer.” A SaaS product built for restaurant owners should not go after a broad term like “small business software.”
Identify the three or four subcategories your business can credibly own. Then test those ideas against what already appears in Google’s results. If page one is filled with Wikipedia, government domains and major media outlets, go narrower. Start with the niche, then move to the keywords — never the other way around.
Take 30 minutes and write down every phrase your customers actually use to describe their problem, in their own words. Look at your inbound emails, sales call transcripts and product reviews. The vocabulary your customers use rarely matches the vocabulary you use internally — and the customer vocabulary is what ranks.
Once you have a list of 30 to 50 seed terms, open Ahrefs or Google’s Keyword Planner. Tools are for expanding what you already know; they’re terrible at telling you what to know in the first place.
3. Layer in the specialty keyword types your competitors miss
There are at least nine specialty keyword formats most agencies ignore: geographic, seasonal, event-based, question-format, service-based, commercial, comparison, best-of and alternative-to. Each one maps to a different stage of the buying journey, and each one is usually less competitive than the obvious head terms.
In a recent niche project, layering comparison and alternative-to keywords on top of a head-keyword strategy roughly tripled the addressable search volume — without touching a single competitive primary term. The same pattern shows up in nearly every site I audit.
4. Tag every keyword by search intent before writing a word
Every keyword falls into one of four intent buckets: informational, navigational, transactional or commercial investigation. The same phrase can mean different things to different searchers, and the only way to know is to look at what’s currently ranking on page one. Google’s own guidance on understanding user intent comes down to the same principle: match your page to what the searcher actually wants.
If page one is full of blog posts, the intent is informational. If it’s full of product pages, the intent is transactional. Match your page type to the intent before you decide what to write. Mismatched intent is the single most common reason good content fails to rank.
5. Fix your technical foundation before publishing anything new
Before adding new pages, run your site through a free Screaming Frog crawl and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Look for four things: crawl errors, broken internal links, slow Largest Contentful Paint on mobile and any redirect chains longer than one hop. Each one is silently capping the ceiling on every page you publish.
This is unglamorous work. It’s also the work that determines whether the next six months of effort compound or evaporate.
6. Standardize your on-page template across every new piece
Decide once, then never re-decide: how your title tags are written, how your H1 relates to your title tag, where your primary keyword appears, how internal links are formatted and what your URL structure looks like.
I keep a one-page template that goes on every content brief we send writers. It saves hours of editing per article and produces consistent results across writers who have never spoken to each other. Standardization is what lets you scale; ad-hoc decisions are what burn content teams out.
7. Build content in clusters, not in isolation
For every commercial keyword you target, plan a cluster: one pillar piece and three to five supporting pieces that link inward to it. Search engines reward sites that demonstrate topical depth, and clusters are the cleanest way to demonstrate it.
A single well-built cluster of six pages around one commercial topic will outperform 30 disconnected blog posts every time. Test that against your own analytics if you doubt it. The math is one-sided.
8. Earn links through original data, not cold outreach
Cold outreach link building has been the lowest-yield activity in SEO for at least three years. The replacement is original research: publish one piece per quarter that contains data nobody else has — even if your sample size is small. Journalists and bloggers cite primary sources because primary sources make their work easier.
Last year, one of our small-sample data pieces earned more high-authority backlinks in two months than a previous client’s six-month outreach campaign. The ratio wasn’t close.
9. Track three metrics monthly — and ignore the rest
The SEO industry has trained founders to obsess over dashboards. The truth is that three numbers tell you almost everything: how many of your targeted commercial keywords are ranking in positions 1 to 10, how much qualified organic traffic those rankings produce and how many of those visits assist a conversion.
Ranked positions tell you if your work is paying off. Traffic tells you if the rankings are valuable. Assisted conversions tell you if the traffic is worth the next month of investment. Everything else is noise until you’re operating at meaningful scale.
10. Audit, dedupe and prune every quarter
Most sites lose more SEO performance to keyword cannibalization, duplicate intent and stale content than they gain from new publishing. Every 90 days, audit your existing content: which pages are competing against each other for the same query, which are pulling impressions but no clicks and which are pulling neither?
Merge the cannibalizing pages. Refresh the impression-rich but click-poor pages with better titles and meta descriptions. Redirect the truly dead ones to their nearest healthy cousin. Pruning is unglamorous work that often produces the single biggest one-quarter SEO lift any site will ever see.
The system above isn’t proprietary. Every step is something a careful agency would do, in roughly the same order. What separates the founders who win at SEO from the ones who plateau isn’t access to a secret framework. It’s the discipline to do all 10 steps in sequence, on a quarterly cadence, for two to three years before judging the results.
By the time you do hire an agency, you’ll know exactly what to ask. The ones that can’t answer those questions will filter themselves out before they bill you.
Key Takeaways
When founders ask me how to start with SEO, they usually expect a tool recommendation. The honest answer is that the tool isn’t the problem. The sequence is.
For the past few years, my agency has been refining the same end-to-end SEO process — the one I now use with every new client and break down across an eight-module curriculum we run for our team. The steps work because they’re ordered. Most founders fail at SEO not because they skip steps but because they do them in the wrong order: writing content before researching keywords, building links before fixing crawl errors and chasing traffic before defining what kind of traffic moves their business.
Here’s the 10-step sequence I follow, in the order I follow it. You can run all of it yourself for the cost of two free tools and a few weekends.
