# Seed stage SaaS SEO > SEO with no domain authority and a two person team: the first twenty pages to publish in order, what to ignore for a year, and who to hire first. Source: https://saas-marketing.net/playbooks/seed-stage-saas-seo/ Topic: SaaS SEO Type: playbook Published: 2026-09-11 Last updated: 2026-09-11 Publisher: SaaS Marketing (saas-marketing.net) License: CC BY 4.0. Quote or republish with attribution and a link to https://saas-marketing.net/playbooks/seed-stage-saas-seo/ ## Short answer At seed stage, SaaS SEO is a publishing habit plus five bottom of funnel pages. With a domain rating under 20 you cannot win broad category terms, so publish one category page, five integration or use case pages, three comparison pages, two alternatives pages, one free tool and eight jobs to be done posts. Ignore link retainers, programmatic sets and international for twelve months. Founder led distribution substitutes for authority. ## Key takeaways - A domain under DR 20 can win competitor comparison, alternatives, integration and long tail task queries, and almost nothing else. - Publish the five bottom of funnel pages first because they convert at several times the rate of any blog post you write. - Twelve months of deliberate omissions matter more than the tactics: no link retainer, no programmatic set, no hreflang, no redesign. - Founder posting and podcast appearances generate the early links and brand queries that a DR 18 domain cannot earn from content alone. - Hire one generalist marketer at roughly 85K to 120K base, buy eight hours a month of SEO strategy, and buy writing by the article. - Expect 6 to 12 months before the first page one rankings, and budget cash for that gap rather than pretending it away. --- A domain rating of 18 disqualifies you from roughly ninety percent of the keyword list your tool just exported. That is the actual constraint at seed, and almost every startup SEO guide walks straight past it into persona workshops and topic clusters. This plan assumes two marketers, no link budget, and a product about six hundred people have heard of. Twenty pages, in order, plus a list of things you should refuse to do until month thirteen. ## What a domain under DR 20 can actually rank for You can win queries where the top ten is made of other small vendors, forum threads and blog posts nobody has touched since 2023. You cannot win queries where the top ten is G2, Capterra, HubSpot and a Zapier programmatic page. Everything in this playbook comes from sorting your keyword list into those two piles. Open ten SERPs manually before you write a word. If four results are directories and the rest sit above DR 70, close the tab. If two results come from companies at roughly your stage, that query is available to you this quarter. The pattern is consistent. The closer a query sits to a purchase and the more specific it is about a product, a competitor or a task, the weaker the competing pages and the higher the conversion rate. That principle runs through everything in our [SaaS SEO](/saas-seo/) material, and it matters ten times more at seed than it does at Series C, because at seed you have no authority to spend on anything else. Writing forty top of funnel posts about the category because a tool showed 8,000 monthly searches. Those posts will sit at position 40 for eighteen months, generate a few hundred sessions from people who will never buy, and consume the entire content budget. We have watched three companies do exactly this since 2024. All three had to prune most of it later. ## The first twenty pages, in publishing order Here is the sequence, using a time tracking product for creative agencies as the running example. Order matters because the early pages fund the argument for continuing. | # | Page type | Example title | Week | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Category page | Time tracking software for creative agencies | 1 | | 2 | Comparison | Harvest vs our product: an honest teardown | 2 | | 3 | Comparison | Toggl vs our product for agency billing | 3 | | 4 | Comparison | Clockify vs our product at 20 seats | 4 | | 5 | Alternatives | Harvest alternatives for agencies in 2026 | 5 | | 6 | Alternatives | Toggl alternatives with client billing built in | 6 | | 7 | Integration | Time tracking for Asana | 7 | | 8 | Integration | Time tracking for Linear | 8 | | 9 | Use case | Tracking retainer burn across multiple clients | 9 | | 10 | Integration | Time tracking that syncs with Xero | 10 | | 11 | Use case | Time tracking for agencies billing in two currencies | 11 | | 12 | JTBD post | How to work out your agency utilisation rate | 12 | | 13 | JTBD post | How to bill a client for rework without an argument | 13 | | 14 | Free tool | Agency utilisation rate calculator | 14 to 16 | | 15 | JTBD post | What to do when a retainer runs 30 percent over | 17 | | 16 | JTBD post | How to set agency blended hourly rates | 18 | | 17 | JTBD post | Timesheet approval workflows that people follow | 19 | | 18 | JTBD post | How to forecast agency capacity for next quarter | 20 | | 19 | JTBD post | What to do when a client disputes billable hours | 21 | | 20 | JTBD post | Moving an agency from spreadsheets to time tracking | 22 | Twenty-two weeks, one page a week, with three weeks absorbed by the free tool build. That cadence is achievable by two people who also run everything else. Anything faster and the briefs get thin. Hold the whole list in one sheet with target query, current position, target page and internal links in and out. Our [SaaS keyword map template](/templates/saas-keyword-map-template/) is the version we use, and the important column is the one most teams omit: which existing page links to this new one on the day it publishes. ## Why the five bottom of funnel pages come first Pages 2 through 6 are the five that pay for everything else. Three comparisons, two alternatives pages. They are the only assets on this list that convert at a rate worth reporting in a board deck. Traffic will be small and you should say so out loud before you build them. A comparison page for a mid-sized competitor in a niche category typically settles at 40 to 120 organic sessions a month once it ranks. That is not a typo. The reason to build it anyway is the conversion rate: pages targeting competitor and alternatives queries commonly convert to trial in the 3 to 8 percent band, against 0.3 to 1 percent for a general blog post. **3% to 8%** Typical trial signup rate on a well built SaaS comparison page, against 0.3% to 1% for a general blog post Do the arithmetic. Ninety sessions at 5 percent is four to five trials a month from one page. Three comparison pages and two alternatives pages, all performing at that level, gives you roughly twenty trials a month by month nine. At a 20 percent trial to paid rate and a 9,000 dollar ACV, that is a meaningful line in a seed stage revenue model. The build details matter more than the count. Each comparison page needs a real feature table with honest losses in it, current pricing with a dated last-checked line, a paragraph naming who should genuinely pick the competitor, and a migration path. We walk through the page structure and the claims review in [ship five bottom of funnel pages](/courses/saas-seo-sprint/02-bofu-pages/). Competitor pricing changes. A comparison page with a stale price is worse than no page, because a prospect who spots one error stops trusting the whole table. Budget 20 minutes per page per quarter to re-check pricing and plan limits, and put a visible last-reviewed date on the page. If you cannot commit to that cadence, build three comparison pages rather than eight. ## What to deliberately ignore for twelve months This is the half of the plan that actually decides the outcome. Four things will be recommended to you repeatedly. Refuse all four. There is a fifth, quieter one: the blog redesign. Nobody has ever failed to rank because the blog template used the wrong font. Ship on whatever your Webflow or Next.js setup already does, and spend the design hours on the free tool instead. ## The distribution that substitutes for domain authority You cannot buy authority at seed, and you cannot earn it from twenty pages alone. What you can do is make a founder visible enough that people link to and search for the company by name, which is the fastest route to the brand signal that helps everything else rank. **The weekly founder distribution loop** Original data is the other reliable route, and at seed it is cheaper than it sounds. Survey 120 customers and prospects on one number nobody has published for your category, write it up with the method disclosed, and you have the only asset on your site that other people have a reason to cite. That is the mechanic behind the approach in [earn links and AI citations](/courses/saas-seo-sprint/04-links-and-citations/), and it works far better than outreach at this stage. ## Who to hire, and what each option costs Here is the position. At seed you hire one generalist marketer in-house, buy SEO strategy by the hour, and buy writing by the article. You do not buy an agency retainer. The founder-writes-everything option deserves a word of defence. It genuinely produces the best pages, because the founder knows why the product exists and can make claims nobody else can make. It is also the single most common reason a seed stage content programme stops dead in month five. Plan the handover before the founder burns out, not after. ## What 20 to 30 percent of revenue actually buys Run the numbers on a company at 600K ARR taking 25 percent into marketing. That is 150K a year, all in. | Line | Annual cost | Note | |---|---|---| | First marketing hire, loaded | $108,000 | $90K base plus roughly 20 percent loading | | Freelance writing, 2 articles a month | $14,400 | At $600 per article | | Contract SEO strategist, 8 hours a month | $19,200 | At $200 per hour | | Tooling (Ahrefs or Semrush, one seat, plus analytics) | $3,600 | One seat only at this stage | | Free tool build (one-off, contracted) | $4,800 | 40 hours of contract front end work | | Total | $150,000 | Leaves nothing for paid. That is the trade | That table is the whole argument. At seed you can fund a person and a publishing habit, or you can fund paid acquisition, and you cannot fund both properly. If your payback period on paid is already under nine months and the channel scales, fund paid and delay this plan by two quarters. If paid CAC is climbing and you have no organic base at all, fund this. The wider decision sits in the [SaaS startup marketing playbook](/playbooks/saas-startup-marketing/), and the channel mix question is worked through in [demand generation for SaaS startups](/guides/demand-generation-for-saas-startups/). ## The failure mode at month nine Here is what it looks like when this goes wrong, because the survivorship bias in this category is total. Month nine. Twenty pages live, 900 organic sessions a month, 11 trials, two paid customers. Someone in the leadership meeting says SEO does not work for us. Three quarters of the time, the diagnosis is one of four things: the pages targeted queries the domain could never win, nothing was internally linked so the five commercial pages sat orphaned, publishing stopped at page twelve, or the comparison pages went stale and stopped converting. Pull Search Console, filter queries by regex to those containing vs, alternative, integration or pricing, and compare the last 90 days against the previous 90. If commercial impressions are climbing and clicks are climbing, the programme is working and the total session number is misleading you. If commercial impressions are flat after nine months, the keyword selection was wrong and no amount of extra publishing will fix it. Model the expected curve before you start so nobody is surprised. Our [organic traffic forecast calculator](/calculators/organic-traffic-forecast/) will give you a defensible month by month projection from your page count and target query volumes, and having that chart in front of the board in month two prevents the month nine argument entirely. ## What to do in the next fourteen days **Seed stage SEO, first two weeks** If you want the compressed version of the first quarter, the [90 day SaaS SEO plan](/playbooks/saas-seo-90-day-plan/) sequences the same work against sprint dates. And if organic is one of three channels you are standing up at once, read it alongside [B2B SaaS startup marketing](/guides/b2b-saas-startup-marketing/) and [lead generation for a SaaS startup](/guides/saas-startup-lead-generation/) so you are not funding three half-built programmes. The summary is short. Five commercial pages, one page a week, a founder who posts, and the discipline to say no to four expensive distractions for a year. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the best SEO strategy for a SaaS startup with no budget and no domain authority? Publish five bottom of funnel pages first: three competitor comparisons and two alternatives pages. They target queries where the top ten is other small vendors rather than G2 and HubSpot, and they convert at several times the rate of a blog post. Then add integration pages and long tail task posts on a weekly cadence. Skip link retainers entirely for the first year. ### How long does SEO take to work for an early stage SaaS company? On a domain under DR 20, plan for 6 to 12 months before the first page one rankings on anything commercial, and 3 to 5 months for genuinely long tail task queries. Integration and comparison pages often move faster than blog posts because the competing pages are weaker. Anyone promising results in 90 days is describing a site that already has authority. ### How many pages should a seed stage SaaS publish per month? Four to six. That is one a week from a two person team, which is sustainable without hiring. Volume beyond that at seed usually means thinner briefs, weaker research and pages nobody would keep if search disappeared. Twenty good pages in five months beats sixty mediocre ones, because the twenty can each be refreshed and internally linked properly. ### Should a seed stage SaaS hire an SEO agency or an in-house marketer? Hire the in-house generalist and buy strategy by the hour. A 4K to 12K per month agency retainer at seed buys process overhead you do not need yet, and the agency cannot do the founder led distribution that actually substitutes for domain authority. Contract an SEO strategist for 6 to 10 hours a month at 150 to 300 an hour to set the keyword map and review briefs. ### How much should a seed stage SaaS spend on marketing? Seed stage SaaS companies commonly run marketing at 20 to 30 percent of revenue, which at 600K ARR is 120K to 180K a year all in. The loaded cost of one marketer eats most of that. What is left, usually 30K to 60K, covers freelance writing, one SEO tool seat and a contract strategist. Plan the split before you hire, not after. ### Do I need backlinks to rank as an early stage SaaS? For category head terms, yes, and that is precisely why you should not target them yet. For competitor comparisons, integration pages and specific task queries, a handful of natural referring domains plus correct internal linking is often enough. Buy no links. Earn them through founder posting, podcast appearances, original data and a free tool people cite. ### What should a seed stage SaaS deliberately not do in SEO? Four things: no link outreach retainer, no programmatic page set, no international or hreflang work, and no chasing Core Web Vitals beyond a passing score. Each consumes months and returns nothing at DR 18. Revisit all four once you have twenty indexed pages, a live conversion rate per page type, and someone whose full time job is organic.