Most founders don’t ignore SEO. They simply misunderstand it.
SEO is almost always seen as important, but rarely seen clearly. It lives in a strange middle ground: too technical to feel intuitive, too slow-moving to feel urgent, and too opaque to feel predictable. As a result, many founders make reasonable decisions about SEO that quietly undermine its impact.
Over time, those small misunderstandings compound into stalled growth, wasted spend, or a sense that “SEO just doesn’t work for us.”
In this brief, I’ll discuss some of the most common SEO mistakes startups make, why they’re so easy to fall into, and how fractional SEO consulting helps founders replace guesswork with clarity, momentum, and real impact.
Founders often think of SEO the same way they think about paid ads or email: as a channel you turn on, measure, and optimize independently.
But SEO isn’t a channel in the traditional sense. It’s a strategy layer that cuts across product, content, engineering, brand, and growth.
When SEO is treated as a standalone activity, owned by an agency, freelancer, or junior hire, it often becomes disconnected from the decisions that actually determine success.
Fractional SEO leadership reframes SEO as part of your overall growth strategy. Instead of asking “How do we get more traffic?”, the conversation shifts to “How does organic search support our business goals—and where does it not?” That alignment is where leverage starts.
Many startups confuse movement with progress.
Publishing more blog posts. Chasing more keywords. Fixing more technical issues. Buying more backlinks. The SEO backlog grows, dashboards look busy, and reports get longer, but results don’t meaningfully change. This leads to the "SEO Death Spiral", a term coined by Ethan Smith, which occurs when companies work on low impact activities that drive no results. This leads to fatigue and the conclusion that "SEO doesn't work". This is one of the most common founder SEO mistakes: assuming that more SEO work automatically leads to better outcomes. It doesn’t.
SEO only works when effort is focused on the right things, in the right order, for the right reasons. As outlined in this video, Ethan zeroes in on the idea that the top 5% of SEO activities lead to 95% of the impact.
A fractional SEO consultant brings focus and prioritization. They help founders understand what not to work on, where diminishing returns kick in, and which initiatives actually move the needle. The result is less activity, but more progress and more impact.
Early on, founders often default to the most accessible option: a freelancer, a fancy agency, or a generalist growth marketer who “can handle SEO.”
That decision makes sense when SEO is exploratory or low-stakes. But as the company grows, the cost of getting SEO wrong increases dramatically, often without founders realizing it.
Technical debt accumulates. Content misses the mark. Architecture decisions get locked in. And by the time someone senior looks under the hood, the cleanup is exhaustive and expensive.
Fractional SEO consulting gives founders access to senior-level judgment without committing to a full-time executive hire. It’s a way to get leadership early—before mistakes compound—while keeping flexibility as the company evolves.
Read more about how to hire for SEO, including how to evaluate when you need an agency, freelancer, in-house role or fractional SEO consultant.
Founders are wired for speed. Experiments should show signal quickly, or they’re cut.
SEO doesn’t work that way, especially for newer businesses.
The most durable SEO strategies often look unimpressive early on because they’re building foundations: site structure, topical authority, content credibility, and internal alignment. When founders expect immediate ROI, SEO is either abandoned too early, or pushed toward shortcuts that backfire later.
Consider a new business that no one has ever heard of. The domain is 6 months old. There is no content, no reviews, no one talking about you. Why would Google and LLMs suddenly decide to reward you with rankings and citations. For startups, it is sometimes an uphill battle, one that we can climb with the right gear and patience. But we won't reach the summit overnight.
Fractional SEO leaders help founders set realistic expectations and define leading indicators of success. Instead of asking “Are we ranking number 1 for [keyword] yet?”, the question becomes “Are we building momentum that will compound?” That shift prevents premature abandonment and short-term thinking.
Tip: as we build SEO foundations, you can quick wins by testing keywords and conversion funnels with paid search campaigns.
In many startups, SEO is “owned” by someone in theory, but by no one in practice.
Agencies execute. Freelancers fix things. Content teams publish. Engineering ships features. But no one is accountable for how it all fits together, or whether it’s working.
When SEO lacks ownership, it becomes reactive and fragmented.
Fractional SEO consulting introduces clear ownership. Someone is responsible for decisions, tradeoffs, and outcomes. That single point of accountability turns SEO from a background activity into a coherent growth function.
Founders often over-index on keywords because they’re visible and easy to measure.
But modern SEO has far more to do with structure, intent, authority, and topics than simply keyword lists. You can rank for the “right” terms and still fail to drive meaningful growth if the underlying strategy is misaligned.
Fractional SEO leadership focuses on why people search, what they are trying to achieve, and how we can help solve their problem. That leads to better decisions about content, positioning, site architecture, and how SEO supports the broader customer journey.
One of the most common founder-led SEO mistakes is over-indexing on top-of-funnel content.
Blog posts targeting broad, informational keywords that have massive search volume feels safe. They’re easy to justify, easy to measure, and can often show early signs of traffic growth. For founders, this creates the impression that SEO is “working.”
The problem is that traffic alone rarely drives true impact.
Startups end up publishing large volumes of content that attract:
Moreover, this type of content is increasingly leading to zero-click searches, so most startups are lucky if this will even drive traffic anymore.
Meanwhile, high-intent, lower funnel queries, the ones tied to use cases, comparisons, integrations, pricing context, or problem-aware buyers, are underdeveloped or ignored entirely.
This creates a dangerous mismatch: growing traffic with limited pipeline impact.
Fractional SEO consulting reframes SEO around business intent, not just search volume. Instead of asking “How do we get more traffic?”, the focus shifts to “Where in the funnel can SEO actually influence revenue, adoption, or sales conversations?”
That usually leads to:
Top-of-funnel content still has a role, but it stops being the default SEO strategy. SEO becomes a growth lever, not just a publishing engine.
What ties all of these mistakes together isn’t ignorance or neglect. It’s lack of clarity.
Founders are making rational decisions with incomplete information. SEO feels opaque, slow, and hard to evaluate, so it’s managed at arm’s length, optimized for cost, or judged too quickly.
Fractional SEO consulting exists to close that gap.
At its core, fractional SEO consulting gives founders something they rarely have with SEO: a trusted, senior partner who understands both search and the business.
That changes the conversation:
Instead of asking “Is SEO working?”, founders start asking “How do we use SEO intentionally?”
That’s when results become predictable, defensible, and scalable.
SEO doesn’t fail because founders don’t care enough. It fails because it lacks structure and focus.
If SEO feels important but unclear, or busy without delivering real business impact, that’s not a sign to abandon it. It’s a sign that leadership, not execution, is the missing piece.
That’s the problem fractional SEO consulting is designed to solve.
If you're a founder looking to build your SEO foundations, scale your organic growth or revenue, or re-set your broken SEO programs, get in touch – I'd love to chat.
