Brighton has a long-standing tech and digital community. For years much of it clustered around the station, including in New England House, a council-owned business centre that housed more than a hundred small firms before it closed in late 2024 over fire safety problems. The sector also spreads across co-working spaces and offices around the city, and drew on graduates from the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton. Many of these companies sell software or services nationally or internationally from a small team in the city.
For a start-up like that, SEO is a slow-burning but valuable channel. It costs less than paid acquisition over time, it compounds, and it reaches buyers at the moment they are researching a problem. It also has some traps that catch technical teams in particular. This is the order we recommend.
1. Check Google can see your site
Tech teams often build marketing sites with the same JavaScript frameworks they use for the product. That can work fine for search, but it often doesn't by default. Common problems:
- Content rendered only in the browser, so Google sees an empty shell at first and may take a long time to index pages, or not index them at all.
- Client-side routing with no real URLs for important pages.
- Staging or preview domains left open and indexed.
- Marketing pages blocked by a robots.txt copied from the app.
- Metadata (titles, descriptions, canonical tags) set by JavaScript after load, or the same on every page.
The quickest check: open Google Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool on a key page, and look at the rendered HTML and screenshot. If the important text isn't there, fix that before anything else. Server-side rendering or static generation, which most modern frameworks support, usually solves it.
2. Structure the site around problems, not features
Founders naturally describe their product in their own terms. Buyers search in theirs. A company selling scheduling software for clinics will find far more people searching "how to reduce patient no-shows" than "clinic scheduling platform". Both matter, but the first group is often larger and earlier in their journey.
A sensible structure for a B2B software site:
- Homepage: what the product does, for whom, in plain language.
- Use-case or solution pages: one per problem or audience, each with its own clear target search.
- Feature pages: for features that people search for by name.
- Integration pages: one per integration, because people search "[tool] + [tool] integration".
- Pricing: clear, even if it says "from".
- Comparison and alternatives pages: covered below.
- Resources or blog: answers to the questions buyers ask.
3. Do keyword research once, properly
Spend a few days on keyword research before writing. Talk to your sales and support team: what do prospects ask on calls? What words do they use? Then check those phrases in a keyword tool, look at what currently ranks, and group the searches by intent. You will often find that the category name you use internally is barely searched, while the problem you solve has plenty of demand.
4. Write comparison pages honestly
Searches like "[big competitor] alternatives" and "[your product] vs [competitor]" are made by people close to a buying decision. They are worth winning. The pages that rank and convert are fair: they say plainly who the competitor suits better, where you are different, and where you are better. Buyers can tell a hatchet job, and so, increasingly, can search engines and AI assistants.
5. Build content from the team's expertise
Start-ups have an advantage over big competitors: the people building the product know the problem deeply. A short interview with an engineer or founder often produces more useful material than a week of desk research. Turn it into guides that answer a specific question, with examples, screenshots and opinions. Avoid publishing a stream of thin posts just to have a blog; three excellent guides beat thirty generic ones.
6. Earn links through what you know
Tech firms have good link-building options:
- Original data from your product (anonymised and aggregated), published as research.
- Open-source tools, templates or calculators.
- Talks at meet-ups and conferences, with a write-up on your site.
- Guest pieces in the trade publications your buyers read.
- Listings in integration marketplaces and partner directories.
- Local coverage: Brighton and Sussex business press and university links for spin-outs and graduate founders.
7. Measure what matters
Traffic is not the goal; pipeline is. Set up conversions in your analytics for demo requests, trial sign-ups and contact forms, and if possible connect them to your CRM so you can see which landing pages lead to customers. In Search Console, track impressions and clicks for your priority topics rather than the site as a whole.
8. Plan for AI search
Many B2B buyers now ask AI assistants for shortlists: "What are the best tools for X for a small team?". Assistants tend to recommend products that are clearly described on their own sites and mentioned consistently on review platforms, comparison articles and community discussions. Keep your product descriptions specific and up to date, make sure you are listed on the main software review sites, and see our page on AI search visibility.
Mistakes we see most often
| Mistake | Why it hurts | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing site on a subdomain of the app, sharing its robots.txt | Key pages blocked or confused with app pages | Separate rules for the marketing site, checked in Search Console |
| Blog full of company news | Nobody searches for your funding announcement | Keep news, but put most effort into buyer questions |
| Rebrand without redirects | Links and rankings to old URLs are lost | Redirect map before launch (see migrations) |
| Pricing hidden behind "contact us" | Buyers searching for prices go to competitors | Publish at least a starting point or how pricing works |
| Thin integration pages | Google treats them as duplicates | Explain what the integration actually does and how to set it up |
Working with a small team
Most start-ups don't have a marketer whose whole job is SEO. That is fine if the work is organised. Three things help:
- One owner. Someone, often a founder or product marketer, is responsible for SEO decisions, even if others do the work.
- SEO in the definition of done. When developers ship a new page template, title tags, canonical tags and indexability are checked as part of the release, not afterwards.
- A content rhythm you can keep. Two good pieces a month, every month, beats a burst of ten followed by silence.
Start-up SEO checklist
- Key pages render their content in the HTML Google receives.
- Staging and preview sites are blocked from indexing.
- Every important page has a unique title, description and canonical tag.
- Search Console and analytics are set up, with demo or trial sign-ups tracked as conversions.
- Solution pages target problems buyers search for.
- At least two honest comparison pages are live.
- A list of the questions sales hears every week, turned into a content plan.
- Listings on the main software review sites are complete and current.
What a first three months might look like
- Month one: technical audit and fixes, Search Console and analytics set up properly, keyword research.
- Month two: rewrite the homepage and key solution pages, publish the first two comparison pages.
- Month three: first in-depth guides from team interviews, start link-building around one piece of original data.
After that, it is a steady rhythm of new content, updates to what is already ranking, and links. If you are a Brighton start-up and want a sense-check of where to begin, send us your site.