Webinar Insights | Startup Your SEO for SaaS

Growth is critical to the success of any startup, and SEO is a marketing strategy that can supercharge the growth of budding businesses. But in the intensity of getting a startup off the ground, what should you focus on when it comes to SEO? This article provides some insights for using SEO to grow a startup from scratch.

Domain and Brand Name Choice

It’s important to put some thought into and be selective about the brand name for your startup and the domain name you choose for your website. You probably want to focus solely on the product or service you’re offering—the names you choose for your brand might feel like an afterthought.

You can, however, create confused messaging when you don’t think carefully about brand and domain names. A good perspective is to ask what happens if your brand becomes big? You don’t want to be in a tricky situation where another well-known company has a similar name or there are no domain names available that are related to your brand.

Use the following tips when researching brand and domain names:

Get creative and try to pick something as unique as possible. There are even online brand name generators to do the thinking for you.
Google your chosen brand name using a VPN to check if other companies in nearby countries (and your own country) use a similar name
Conduct thorough due diligence on the brand name you select and whether it’s trademarked and on the domain you buy and its link history.
Shortlist several candidate names and get feedback from friends or colleagues to narrow it down to one brand and domain name

Hire Your First SEO Specialist

Excellent SEOs are hard to come by. If you’re a founder with minimal SEO knowledge, trusting someone to do SEO for you is a big decision. You don’t quite know when launching your business whether SEO will contribute heavily to its future growth.

Seek out advice from as many people as possible. Consider even hiring an external agency or consultant to get advice on the best SEO approach for your business. Perhaps even reach out to SEOs working for other startups using networks like LinkedIn to get their opinions.

Then, commit to either hiring an SEO freelancer, partnering with an SEO agency, doing it yourself, or working towards building your own in-house SEO team. Since SEO often takes 1-2 years to start showing its value, it may be best to execute your strategy using external resources until you’re ready to commit to it for the long term.

Initial Keyword Research and Content Production

With a website domain name purchased and an SEO plan in place, start your initial keyword research. Even if your SEO knowledge is limited, you can execute this part of the strategy alone. Use a resource like learningseo.io to learn how to develop a solid keyword research plan.

Fast-track your ability to find keywords using paid SaaS solutions, such as Semrush or ahrefs. You can also look at competitors’ websites and get an idea of the kind of keywords they’re targeting with their content. Often, there are opportunities to win prime search positions for lucrative keywords simply by writing better content than your competitors.

When posting content, focus on quality content that conveys expertise. As a new brand, quantity is also important. You can’t get results and build up authority with a sparse blog of 1-2 posts. This doesn’t imply you need to become a content machine, but try to push out a good number of articles on your blog initially to build a solid content base.

Work with Who Already Ranks

As a startup, getting the word out there about your business using SEO is very unlikely to show immediate results. A faster and potentially cheaper starting strategy is to work with who already ranks. There are two possible ways to do this:

Leverage affiliate CPA programs: Armed with a set of keywords related to your offering, you can validate your product-market fit by reaching out to businesses and blogs that already rank for these competitive terms. Try to build a partnership through an affiliate deal in which you pay that website for each sale, trial, or other valuable customer action they bring to you.
Purchase currently ranking websites: With extensive keyword research, you’ll probably notice a few smaller blogs or abandoned sites ranking for some of the terms you’d like to rank for. Contact the site owners and see if they’re selling so that you can attempt to capture their pre-existing authority and re-direct their links to your domain or otherwise merge these sites with yours.

How to Build Efficiently

One important step to efficiently build out your web presence is to opt for a plug-and-play content management system (CMS). Among several popular choices are Duda, WordPress, and Squarespace (Duda has the leading core web vitals scores out of all popular platforms). Enterprise platforms or custom builds are only worth considering when you’ve established your startup as a successful business. The benefits of plug and play platforms include:

Easier to find talented people who know how to optimize sites on these platforms and debus issues.
Dedicated support staff typically answer questions promptly
You still don’t know quite what features and functionality you might need from an enterprise CMS or custom build
You get plenty of out-of-the-box features that can help with your initial SEO efforts

Initial SEO KPIs and Metrics

When you’ve bought a domain name, performed keyword research, and started publishing content, it’s time to think about how to measure the success of your SEO efforts. Try not to measure too many things at the beginning. As a founder at a startup, you don’t have the time to become overburdened by analysis paralysis. In particular, don’t waste time trying to use scripts to track things that you won’t have time to look through.

Consider using the information provided by Google Search Console to gauge initial SEO success. Search Console provides a wealth of useful information, including the top queries people search for to find your site and the top pages visited sorted by clicks and impressions.

Wrapping Up

In closing, SEO is a long-term game, but being methodical about it has a high chance of boosting the growth potential of your new startup. Use the tips here to make sure you avoid some common stumbling blocks and pain points and get the most from your efforts.

Core web vitals: What agencies need to know in 2026

By Shawn Davis • April 1, 2026

Core Web Vitals aren't new, Google introduced them in 2020 and made them a ranking factor in 2021. But the questions keep coming, because the metrics keep changing and the stakes keep rising. Reddit's SEO communities were still debating their impact as recently as January 2026, and for good reason: most agencies still don't have a clear, repeatable way to measure, diagnose, and fix them for clients. This guide cuts through the noise. Here's what Core Web Vitals actually measure, what good scores look like today, and how to improve them—without needing a dedicated performance engineer on every project. What Core Web Vitals measure Google evaluates three user experience signals to determine whether a page feels fast, stable, and responsive: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the biggest visible element on a page — usually a hero image or headline — to load. Google considers anything under 2.5 seconds good. Above 4 seconds is poor. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. Where FID measures the delay before a user's first click is registered, INP tracks the full responsiveness of every interaction across the page session. A good INP score is under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability — how much page elements unexpectedly move while content loads. A score below 0.1 is good. Higher scores signal that images, ads, or embeds are pushing content around after load, which frustrates users and tanks conversions. These three metrics are a subset of Google's broader Page Experience signals, which also include HTTPS, safe browsing, and mobile usability. Core Web Vitals are the ones you can most directly control and improve. Why your clients' scores may still be poor Core Web Vitals scores vary dramatically by platform, hosting, and how a site was built. Some of the most common culprits agencies encounter: Heavy above-the-fold content . A homepage with an autoplay video, a full-width image slider, and a chat widget loading simultaneously will fail LCP every time. The browser has to resolve all of those resources before it can paint the largest element. Unstable image dimensions . When an image loads without defined width and height attributes, the browser doesn't reserve space for it. It renders the surrounding text, then jumps it down when the image appears. That jump is CLS. Third-party scripts blocking the main thread . Analytics pixels, ad tags, and live chat tools run on the browser's main thread. When they stack up, every click and tap has to wait in line — driving INP scores up. A single slow third-party script can push an otherwise clean site into "needs improvement" territory. Too many web fonts . Each font family and weight is a separate network request. A page loading four font files before rendering any text will fail LCP, especially on mobile connections. Unoptimized images . JPEGs and PNGs served at full resolution, without compression or modern formats like WebP or AVIF, add unnecessary weight to every page load. How to measure them accurately There are two types of Core Web Vitals data you should be looking at for every client: Lab data comes from tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and WebPageTest. It simulates page loads in controlled conditions. Lab data is useful for diagnosing specific issues and testing fixes before you deploy them. Field data (also called Real User Monitoring, or RUM) comes from actual users visiting the site. Google collects this through the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and surfaces it in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Field data is what Google actually uses as a ranking signal — and it often looks worse than lab data because it reflects real-world device and connection variability. If your client's site has enough traffic, you'll see field data in Search Console under Core Web Vitals. This is your baseline. Lab data helps you understand why the scores are what they are. For clients with low traffic who don't have enough field data to appear in CrUX, you'll be working primarily with lab scores. Set that expectation early so clients understand that improvements may not immediately show up in Search Console. Practical fixes that move the needle Fix LCP: get the hero image loading first The single most effective LCP improvement is adding fetchpriority="high" to the hero image tag. This tells the browser to prioritize that resource over everything else. If you're using a background CSS image for the hero, switch it to anelement — background images aren't discoverable by the browser's preload scanner. Also check whether your hosting serves images through a CDN with caching. Edge delivery dramatically reduces the time-to-first-byte, which feeds directly into LCP. Fix CLS: define dimensions for every media element Every image, video, and ad slot on the page needs explicit width and height attributes in the HTML. If you're using responsive CSS, you can still define the aspect ratio with aspect-ratio in CSS while leaving the actual size fluid. The key is giving the browser enough information to reserve space before the asset loads. Avoid inserting content above existing content after page load. This is common with cookie banners, sticky headers that change height, and dynamically loaded ad units. If you need to show these, anchor them to fixed positions so they don't push content around. Fix INP: reduce what's competing for the main thread Audit third-party scripts and defer or remove anything that isn't essential. Tools like WebPageTest's waterfall view or Chrome DevTools Performance panel show you exactly which scripts are blocking the main thread and for how long. Load chat widgets, analytics, and ad tags asynchronously and after the page's critical path has resolved. For most clients, moving non-essential scripts to load after the DOMContentLoaded event is a meaningful INP improvement with no visible impact on the user experience. For websites with heavy JavaScript — particularly those built on frameworks with large client-side bundles — consider breaking up long tasks into smaller chunks using the browser's Scheduler API or simply splitting components so the main thread isn't locked for more than 50 milliseconds at a stretch. What platforms handle automatically One of the practical advantages of building on a platform optimized for performance is that many of these fixes are applied by default. Duda, for example, automatically serves WebP images, lazy loads below-the-fold content, minifies CSS, and uses efficient cache policies for static assets. As of May 2025, 82% of sites built on Duda pass all three Core Web Vitals metrics — the highest recorded pass rate among major website platforms. That baseline matters when you're managing dozens or hundreds of client sites. It means you're starting each project close to or at a passing score, rather than diagnosing and patching a broken foundation. How much do Core Web Vitals actually affect rankings? Honestly, they're a tiebreaker — not a primary signal. Google has been clear that content quality and relevance still dominate ranking decisions. A well-optimized site with thin, irrelevant content won't outrank a content-rich competitor just because its CLS is 0.05. What Core Web Vitals do affect is the user experience that supports those rankings. Pages with poor LCP scores have measurably higher bounce rates. Sites with high CLS lose users mid-session. Those behavioral signals — time on page, return visits, conversions — are things search engines can observe and incorporate. The practical argument for fixing Core Web Vitals isn't just "because Google said so." It's that faster, more stable pages convert better. Every second of LCP improvement can reduce bounce rates by 15–20% depending on the industry and device mix. For client sites that monetize through leads or eCommerce, that's a revenue argument, not just an SEO argument. A repeatable process for agencies Audit every new site before launch. Run PageSpeed Insights and record LCP, INP, and CLS scores for both mobile and desktop. Flag anything in the "needs improvement" or "poor" range before the client sees the live site. Check Search Console monthly for existing clients. The Core Web Vitals report surfaces issues as they appear in field data. Catching a regression early — before it compounds — is significantly easier than explaining a traffic drop after the fact. Document what you've improved. Clients rarely see Core Web Vitals scores on their own. A monthly one-page performance summary showing before/after scores builds credibility and makes your technical work visible. Prioritize mobile. Google uses mobile-first indexing, and field data shows that mobile CWV scores are almost always worse than desktop. If you only have time to optimize one version, do mobile first. Core Web Vitals aren't a one-time fix. Platforms change, new scripts get added, campaigns bring in new widgets. Build the audit into your workflow and treat it like any other ongoing deliverable, and you'll stay ahead of the issues before they affect your clients' rankings. Duda's platform is built with Core Web Vitals performance in mind. Explore how it handles image optimization, script management, and site speed automatically — so your team spends less time debugging and more time building.