The full guide
What does an SEO agency for startups actually do?
We get your site found in Google and cited by AI answer engines, then turn that traffic into leads. The work splits into three parts: technical SEO (making the site crawlable, fast and correctly structured), content (pages that answer what buyers search), and generative engine optimization (being the source ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews quote).
- Technical SEO. Crawl and index audits, Core Web Vitals, rendering, structured data, sitemaps, redirects, internal linking. Fixed in your codebase by our engineers.
- Content. Keyword research with buyer intent, service and comparison pages, blog posts, pricing pages that AI engines cite.
- GEO / AI search optimization. Answer-first page structure, entity and schema markup, llms.txt, AI crawler access, brand mentions.
- Growth campaigns. Landing pages, conversion tracking, analytics and email capture.
Most of our SEO clients are also web development clients, which is the point: the people who find the problem are the people who fix it.
What is technical SEO and why does it come first?
Technical SEO is everything that lets Google and AI crawlers find, render, understand and trust your pages: crawlability, speed, mobile rendering, structured data and site architecture. It comes first because content on a site Google can't render or index properly doesn't rank no matter how good it is.
| Area | What we check | What we ship |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl and index | robots.txt, sitemaps, canonical tags, noindex leaks, orphan pages | Fixed directives, generated sitemaps, canonical rules |
| Rendering | Client-side-only content, hydration errors, JavaScript blocking | Server rendering or static generation for key pages |
| Core Web Vitals | LCP, INP, CLS from field data (CrUX) and lab | Image optimization, font loading, script deferral, caching |
| Structured data | Organization, Service, Article, Product, Breadcrumb schema | Valid JSON-LD on every template |
| Architecture | URL structure, internal links, pagination, hreflang for UK/AU/CA | Hub-and-spoke linking, clean URLs, country targeting |
For Next.js sites we tune App Router caching, metadata, image components and route-level rendering, where JavaScript-heavy startup sites usually lose rankings.
What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative engine optimization is the practice of making your pages the source an AI answer engine retrieves and cites when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews a question in your category. It builds on SEO but rewards different things: direct answers, specific numbers, named entities and pages that machines can read without executing JavaScript.
What we change on a page for GEO:
- Answer first. The first 40-60 words under every heading answer the question the heading asks, so a passage can be lifted whole.
- Question headings. H2s written as the literal question buyers ask, pulled from People-Also-Ask and AI-prompt research.
- Specific, citable facts. Prices, timelines, named products and sourced statistics. AI engines prefer pages that state numbers.
- Entity markup. Organization, Service and Article schema plus consistent brand facts across the site.
- Crawler access. Allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended in robots.txt where you want citations; publish an llms.txt listing your key pages.
- Server-rendered HTML. Content present in the initial response, not injected by the browser.
We apply these rules to this page, and we measure AI citations alongside rankings.
How does content fit in?
Content turns rankings into leads by matching pages to what buyers type at each stage: service pages for "hire" and "company" searches, pricing pages for "cost" searches, comparison pages for "vs" and "alternatives" searches, and blog posts for the questions before all of those. We research the keywords, map them to URLs, write the pages and ship them in your CMS or codebase.
A typical startup content plan in the first 90 days:
- 4-6 service pages written as questions and answers, each with a pricing table
- 2-3 pricing or cost pages with real numbers (these get cited most by AI engines)
- 2-3 comparison pages ("X vs Y", "alternatives to Z")
- 4-8 blog posts targeting the People-Also-Ask questions around your category
- One linkable asset (a rate table or calculator) that earns backlinks
Every page follows the same structure we use on our blog: answer first, specific numbers, named proof, internal links, FAQ section.
Why engineering-led SEO instead of a traditional SEO agency?
Because a traditional agency sends you a PDF of 60 issues and your developers fix 6 of them; we open the pull request. The biggest SEO gains for startup sites are engineering changes (rendering, speed, schema, redirects, internal linking at the template level), and the handoff between an SEO vendor and a dev team is where those gains die.
| Report-only SEO agency | ReliaBuilds | |
|---|---|---|
| Technical audit | PDF of findings | Findings plus pull requests in your repo |
| Core Web Vitals | Recommendations | Image, font, script and caching changes shipped |
| Schema markup | Snippets to paste | Implemented in page templates, validated in production |
| Content | Articles in a Google Doc | Pages published in your CMS with metadata and links |
The retainer model fits this: for a monthly retainer quoted as a fixed figure and sized to the hours you need, the same engineers handle SEO fixes, content publishing and small site changes.
How is SEO priced and how long until results?
Every engagement is a fixed scope and a fixed quote after discovery, either as a one-off project (an audit with fixes, a migration) or as a monthly retainer sized to the hours you need. We don't publish a rate card because the work depends on the size of the site, the state of its code and how many pages have to be written. New domains usually see measurable movement in 3-6 months and meaningful lead flow in 6-12; established sites move faster.
| Engagement | Timeline | What's included | How it's priced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO audit and fixes | 2-4 weeks | Crawl and index audit, Core Web Vitals report, prioritized fixes shipped as pull requests | Fixed quote after discovery |
| GEO / AI-search readiness | 1-3 weeks | Answer-first restructuring of key pages, schema, llms.txt, crawler access, citation tracking | Fixed quote after discovery |
| Content package (research + 6-10 pages) | 4-8 weeks | Keyword and prompt research, URL map, written pages, metadata, internal links, publishing | Fixed quote after discovery |
| Ongoing SEO and content retainer | rolling, 6-month minimum recommended | Monthly fixes, new pages, reporting on rankings, citations, traffic and leads | Monthly retainer sized to the hours you need |
| Site migration with SEO protection | 2-6 weeks | Redirect map, metadata parity, pre- and post-launch crawls, monitoring | Fixed quote after discovery |
We don't guarantee rankings; nobody honest does. We report monthly on rankings, AI citations, organic traffic, Core Web Vitals and leads, with the pull requests behind the numbers. See the projects page for sites we've built.