Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Improving a website so relevant people can discover it in organic search results.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work of helping people find your website through unpaid search results. For a SaaS founder, that usually means answering questions your future customers already ask, then making those answers easy for search engines to discover and understand.
Someone searching for “invoice software for freelance designers” has a different problem from someone searching for “what is an invoice.” Both searches might matter to your business. They need different pages.
Start with the searcher 🔎
Before opening a keyword tool, write down the questions you hear in sales calls and support conversations. What are people trying to do? What have they tried? Which alternatives do they compare you with?
That gives keyword research somewhere useful to start. Search volume can help you choose between topics, but a popular query is not automatically a good business opportunity. A broad article may attract thousands of curious readers who will never need your product.
Look at the actual results for a query. Are people expecting a tutorial, a comparison, a template, or a product? This is search intent. If the results are mostly working calculators, another long explanation may miss the point.
What the work actually involves 🛠️
- Useful pages: answer the question directly, show the steps, and include examples someone can use. Your own screenshots and experience are more helpful than another rearranged summary.
- Accessible pages: check that important pages can be crawled and indexed. Give them descriptive titles and link to them from relevant parts of your site.
- Reasons to trust you: explain who wrote the page, substantiate claims, and earn relevant mentions by publishing something worth referring to.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide is a good place to check the technical basics. It also makes clear that there is no magic word count and no guarantee of a first-place ranking.
Choose a first project 🌱
Pick one problem close to a buying decision. Write the page you wish a prospect had read before your last call. Add a natural next step: try the workflow, download the template, or compare plans.
After publishing, use Search Console to check whether the page is indexed and which queries produce impressions and clicks. Use your product or analytics data to see whether those visits lead to qualified signups. Keep those two questions separate: getting discovered and winning a customer require different work.
When SEO deserves your time ⏳
SEO is a plausible growth channel when people already search for your problem and you can produce a better answer. It is harder to rely on when you need customers this week or when buyers do not yet have words for what you sell.
You can still publish useful explanations in those cases. Pair them with direct conversations or another distribution channel instead of waiting for search to do everything.