Is SEO worth it for early-stage products in 2022/23?

[jamesofthedrum]

With big companies pumping a ton of money into snatching up keywords, can a small player really hope to make any gains?

And is playing the long-game of SEO really worthwhile for an early-stage company or is it best to just focus on building, and worry about SEO once you've got some revenue to throw at it?

Curious to hear everyone's thoughts/experience. Thanks!

[DamonHD]

SEO is lots of things, not just the underhand (eg keyword stuffing) nonsense.

Make sure that whatever site you put up HAS GOOD CONTENT, is accessible, uses semantic HTML, and some sort of metadata such as schema.org to help ensure that the search engines can show you for the right queries.

Doing SEO last is like washing your hands last or thinking about security last. It's not hard to do the basic good robust everyday stuff as you go along, and not doing it will likely leave you invisible or worse, IMHO.

[jamesofthedrum]

Interesting, thanks for weighing in!

I think doing technical SEO on a site from the beginning makes a lot of sense. But what about writing articles to capture keywords? I'm not talking about keyword stuffing, as that's obviously dumb, but just creating good (targeted) content. Seems to me that it's less important for early-stage products, no?

[DamonHD]

Unless you want to earn your money as a content creator, don't write pages for that purpose. Write pages to describe your product. IMHO, by all means make sure that you include relevant keywords in those pages.

Google for example seems to much prefer unified sites with a purpose which is not just capturing traffic for the sake of it, eg for ad revenue.

Dog, tail, wagging!

[jamesofthedrum]

Thanks!