SEO for startups: a B2B plan from pre-seed to Series B

By Baba Hausmann · Last updated September 2026

The question founders ask me most is whether SEO is worth it this early. My answer depends on one thing: whether people already want what you sell. SEO puts you in front of buyers at the moment they are deciding. If there are no buyers deciding yet, there is nothing to put you in front of.

The table is the short answer. The rest of the page is what it rests on: a Series A SaaS that doubled its organic conversions in six months, and comparison pages that produced leads at three B2B companies.

What to do at each stage

What would change this advice: data showing your buyers already search for the problem in numbers, with nobody answering it well. Then pages can be your first acquisition channel even at seed. Check that in the search data before you believe it.

Before product-market fit, keep SEO to the basics

A US mental-health SaaS came to me at Series A. Organic was stuck at around 475 conversions a month from about 3.8K visits, flat for months, with no SEO team. Six months later it was about 950 conversions a month from 7.7K visits.

It worked because the product already had traction. Therapists and practice owners were buying it; the new pages put it in front of more of them while they were choosing. If your product is not landing with its audience yet, no page fixes that, and the hours are better spent on sales conversations.

At pre-seed, do three things and stop:

• Search your own brand name and check you rank first for it.
• Open Google Search Console (free) and check that your product and pricing pages are indexed.
• Write down the exact words your first customers use to describe their problem. Those become your pages at seed.

Seed: build the pages buyers read right before they choose

With the healthtech company I ignored search volume when picking topics. I ranked them by how close each sat to a buying decision, and by how much they could bring in over the long run. Search volume tells you what is crowded, not what converts.

For a startup, the fastest page type I know is the comparison page. A buyer with a shortlist does not type your category. They type a competitor's name with doubt attached: "[competitor] reviews", "is [competitor] reliable", "[competitor] disadvantages". Small searches, sharp intent.

Here is what that did at two B2B clients:

• A Dutch fintech lender. The first comparison page went live in late October 2025 with zero search presence. It had 13 clicks in its first month and 290 a month by spring, and 18 leads are attributed to it as the entry page.
• A workplace hardware company. Four comparison pages reached page 1 within 4 to 8 weeks. The lead page collected 11 attributed leads off single-digit monthly clicks. The honest part: the company's total organic leads still fell over the engagement, because its paid budget had been cut by 85% and brand demand fell with it. The comparison pages produced leads against that current. They did not reverse it.

This is how a small company beats a large one in search. The pages that decide a sale are small, specific and quick to build, and a big competitor often has none: at the hardware company, none of them did.

The build is the same every time:

1. A top section naming both vendors and the buyer's question.
2. 8 to 12 real feature rows, with the competitor's claims sourced.
3. When to choose you, tied to specific jobs your buyer needs done.
4. An honest section on when the competitor is the better fit. That section earns the trust that makes the rest believable.
5. Input from sales before drafting: the objections that close deals go on the page.

The full method and the numbers are in the comparison pages client story.

Series A: set SEO priorities and give them an owner

Series A is when organic has to prove it can carry pipeline before the next raise. That was the pressure at the healthtech company. It is also when a small team gets pulled toward every new tactic.

With a small team, your SEO priorities are decided by what you say no to. I use this filter: a task waits unless it passes at least two of these four checks.

• It solves a real blocker right now.
• It drives revenue or conversions in the next one or two quarters (forecast it, don't guess it).
• It matches how your buyers search.
• It builds value that lasts.

The second decision at the healthtech company was to build templates instead of one-off pages: one format for high-intent pages, one for support questions, each tied to what the product does. Two of the new pages entered the site's top 5 by traffic and are still there. The plan was always to hire in-house after Series B, so the templates were written for the team that would take over.

Why fractional at this stage: a senior in-house SEO hire costs €110,000 to €150,000 fully loaded in year one, before you know which pages convert. A fractional senior works 1 to 2 days a week inside your team, owns the strategy, and hands it over. Fractional SEO explains how that works.

Series B: hand it to an in-house team

At the healthtech company, the results justified hiring a full SEO and content team as part of the Series B expansion. That team still runs on the templates. Traffic kept climbing after handover, because the team kept publishing on them.

What I would do differently: spot the winners sooner. The lift was visible in the data before I treated it as a trend. I would have doubled down earlier on the pages that were working, including competitor pages. The full story has the charts.

If your budget is small

My engagements start at €7,500 a month for nine months, so from €67,500 in total. Under €1M ARR that is too much for what organic can return yet. Below €5,000 I decline the work outright, because at that size it has no room to matter. Buy a strategy once, run it with your own team, and bring in senior help when organic has to carry pipeline. Strategy-only advisory runs €1,500 to €2,500 a month.

Two free things to do first:

• Put your numbers through the SEO ROI calculator. It shows what organic could be worth for you, and whether any SEO spend pays back at your deal size.
• Read what to ask before you hire an SEO consultant, so you can tell someone who owns outcomes from someone who executes tasks.