⛔ 3 SEO mistakes SaaS founders make (and how to avoid them)

I’ve helped dozens of founders launch product-led and programmatic SEO strategies over the past few years. I’ve spoken with another 100+ who want to use SEO to get leads for their startup.

Here are the 3 most common mistakes I’ve seen and how you can avoid them.

🎮 1. Just playing to participate rather than to win.

When I hold discovery calls with prospective customers, the most important question I ask is:

“Are you playing to win? Or to participate?”

• Playing to win means SEO is either a #1 or #2 priority for them.

• Playing to participate means they’re just interested in testing SEO as a channel — with minimal investment.

Here's why this matters: SEO requires reaching a critical threshold of effort before you can truly evaluate if it's working.

Many companies with strong fundamentals — high domain authority and large search opportunities — prematurely conclude "SEO doesn't work" simply because they never invested enough to get meaningful results.

This is what we call a false negative. The company had the potential to succeed, but their "play to participate" approach prevented them from reaching the minimum threshold needed to generate real data and momentum.

🚩 2. Not eliminating foundational risk.

After every discovery call, we ask our customers to commit to a strategy audit before we take them on. The audit aims to validate five key things:

1. What are the key long-tail search patterns this company should target?

2. What is the cumulative size of those search patterns?

3. What is the competition within each of these respective search patterns?

4. How much content do we need to target each search pattern at scale?

5. What unique data assets does this company have that can help it differentiate its content when targeting each of these search patterns?

The purpose of the audit is to ensure their engagement is de-risked before they ever sign with us:

• 🌟 This is helpful to the customer because they can see the size and shape of their opportunity, as well as our plan for executing against those opportunities before they sign a contract.

• 👌 It’s also helpful for daydream because we don’t want to work with companies that aren’t a good fit for SEO to begin with—we’d rather spend our time on customers that do have a great use case.

🐢 3. Execution velocity is too slow

Most agencies produce 10-30 blog posts per month. At that pace, you're not getting enough "shots on goal" to generate meaningful data or results.

Our customer OpenArt scaled to 1M+ monthly visits by producing 600+ pSEO pages within the first 8 months of our partnership.

The result? They've earned a 6X bottom-line ROI on their investment and are pacing for an even higher multiple…

But what about quality?

The natural concern is that quality will suffer at higher volumes. However, Piktochart's experience shows it's absolutely possible to maintain quality while scaling content production.

We partnered with Piktochart in May 2024 and created 2,200+ high-quality pages within seven months, resulting in an additional 176K monthly visitors, including a 75% month-over-month increase.

The bottom line?

From my experience, companies who do SEO well:

🏆 1. Fully commit to winning

💸 2. De-risk their investment from day zero

🔄 3. Produce enough content consistently to get meaningful data

🚀 Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help:

1. Book a Call to discuss how daydream can help you drive consistent organic growth — as we have with companies like Clay, Descript, and OpenArt.

2. Request a custom Answer Engine Optimization Audit to learn what AI queries your brand appears for, how you stack up vs. your competition, and how much AI traffic you get.

3. Download The Complete Guide to Programmatic SEO to learn about the frameworks and tactics used by the best experts in programmatic content.

Thanks for reading! Reply any time. 👋🏻

Until next time,
Thenuka