🎯 Why Startups Fail at Acquisition - And How SEO Saves You

Hi! I'm Marlena Kowieska, freelance product manager.

In this video, I break down why paid acquisition isn't sustainable for startups - and how product managers can become the unsung heroes of organic growth through technical SEO. If you're a founder or PM struggling with high Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) or searching for growth that lasts, this is your blueprint.

I’ll walk you through the real startup journey - from blue ocean beginnings to red ocean chaos — and show how to set up SEO foundations that reduce costs and grow your user base sustainably.

🧠 What You'll Learn:
✅ Why SEO is your startup's secret weapon
✅ How to balance SEA vs SEO in your marketing mix
✅ Step-by-step technical SEO for product managers
✅ Tools you need: GSC, GA, Bing Webmaster, sitemaps, and more
✅ How to structure URLs, pages, metadata, and avoid SEO pitfalls
✅ Strategic SEO tips for long-term growth
✅ UX Design System: How a style guide can negatively impact SEO

🔍 Questions Answered in This Video:

❔ How can startups reduce customer acquisition costs without relying on paid ads?
❔ Why is SEO a critical strategy for product managers in tech startups?
❔ The right way of using SEA and SEO, and how should startups use them?
❔ How do I set up the right technical SEO foundations for my startup website?
❔ What tools and steps should a product manager take to get started with SEO?
❔ How do I create a sustainable SEO strategy that scales with my product growth?
❔ What are the biggest SEO mistakes startups make in early stages?

#SEOForStartups #ProductManagerSEO #StartupMarketing #CustomerAcquisition #ReduceCAC #OrganicGrowth #TechnicalSEO #StartupStrategy #SEMvsSEO #startuptips #productmanager #productmanagement #productdevelopment #singlepageapplication #blueocean #marketing #tech #growthhacking #growth #uxdesigner

Music Credits:
Tavorians - Garris L. R. Coleman - Pixabay License
Flactuating - 1xIGNITE - Pixabay License

Chapters:
00:00 The most important rule for startup survival
00:28 Why are startups still alive despite high acquisition costs?
00:44 How product managers make sustainable acquisitions possible
00:55 Why do startups struggle with acquisition costs?
01:06 What is a blue ocean (Blue Ocean Strategy book)
01:13 What is a red ocean
01:50 The reaction to a conservative marketing spending
02:11 The best performing digital marketing channel for acquisition
02:23 The startup gets attention from the media (Inc., Crunchbase, Wired)
02:33 The start of the end
03:16 Acquisitions start going down
03:38 What's your plan for sustainable growth?
04:17 Founder asks product manager for help to lower costs
04:38 The point of inflection for the startup
04:52 SEO as a secret weapon for competitive markets
05:34 Isn't SEO dead?
06:01 Set up the startup's technical foundation for SEO
06:13 Set up Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster tools
06:39 Connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics
06:49 Free keyword research using Bing or Google Ads Campaign planner
07:07 Define a URL structure (breadcrumbs example)
07:48 Performance landing pages vs. content landing pages
07:52 Important considerations for slugs
08:11 Spoofing and impact of slugs
08:34 How to use SEO if you have an app?
09:38 Internal linking for SEO
09:59 The problem with orphan pages: how to solve it
10:37 What pages to index for SEO
11:36 Indexing issues generated by marketing teams
11:57 Considerations for your SEO sitemap
12:29 How to submit your SEO sitemap
13:02 How to make a page SEO friendly (meta-tags)
13:40 The HTML structure for SEO
14:05 The negative impact of UX design system on SEO
14:50 How to solve issues for duplicated content?
15:40 SEO considerations if you have a Single Page Application (SPA)
16:07 Be careful with broken links in SEO
16:26 404s are SEO poison
16:49 Schema markup for SEO
17:11 Loading times for SEO
17:48 Crawling budgets in SEO
18:06 International websites in SEO
18:29 SEO strategy

Other questions:
How can startups reduce customer acquisition costs?
What's the best marketing strategy for early-stage startups?
Can product managers help with SEO?
Is SEO better than paid ads for startups?
How do I build an SEO foundation for my startup?
What does a product manager need to know about SEO?
Why is SEO important in competitive markets?
How do I set up Google Search Console for my startup?
What SEO tools should I use as a startup?
What’s the difference between SEA and SEO?
How can I drive organic traffic to my startup site?
SEO considerations for building a website with React (SPA)