Why your SEO fails after the audit, and what to do next

You get an SEO audit back for your startup, and the team does what's easiest first: they fix the technical problems. A few months later, someone asks, "So, where's our traffic?"

The technical problems don't even begin to scratch the surface. I made a short video on why SEO fails at startups and what actually gets you found. This is the written version, with a little more on each step.

The website you love isn't the website that performs

People love their website for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it looks good. Sometimes it's style and taste. None of that is bad. But when I come in as the SEO, I'm looking at performance.

The technical work is real

I don't want to make the technical work sound easy. I do it too. Getting a developer into a site that's years old, one nobody wants to rebuild, can be hard, and it deserves its time. If a site isn't built right, it can stop search engines and AI from reading it at all. That's what a technical SEO audit is for.

But while that's happening, a good SEO team isn't waiting. They're doing the keyword research, collecting the questions buyers put to AI, and drafting the page content.

So when the site is where it needs to be, the content is ready to go. You don't lose another quarter writing pages after the fixes ship.

The right kind of content

The days of pumping out AI content, page after page, are over. With its March 2024 core update, Google set out to cut low-quality, unoriginal content in its results by 40%. When the update finished rolling out, Google said it had cut 45%.

That doesn't mean AI has no place. I've used it to write original titles and descriptions for more than 200 pages in a few hours, because they were duplicated or missing. Doing them in batches made sense, and those pages got refreshed so search engines would crawl them again.

But you can't just keep publishing pages either. Refresh what you have before you flood the site with more.

Being cited by AI comes and goes

Even when AI does cite you, it doesn't last on its own. One study asked AI the same questions a month apart, and 40 to 60% of the sites it cited were different (Profound, July 2025). One month you're cited, the next you're not.

Meanwhile, Google has been the most reliable source of organic traffic for about as long as there's been an internet. In my own client work, people who find you through search have always converted better. People who come from AI convert better still. By the time they reach your site, they know what they want. They just want to know how to buy it.

What a steady run of pages did for one company

Not a flood: a steady run of original pages. One deep-tech company I worked with this year published 26 new pages between February and July 2026. In the company's own Google Search Console, those pages earned 229,182 impressions and 1,046 clicks. They reached page one for 678 queries, and 113 of those made the top three.

I can't name the company. Every number is filtered to those 26 pages, so nothing from the rest of the site inflates it.

Every page needs a plan to convert

Content alone doesn't change the site. People do. Some of my clients want to see the opportunities first. Then they want the content in a Google Doc they can edit. Then they need to see what the page is going to look like, so I put it into their own template.

And every page gets a plan for how people take action on it. The whole point of getting someone to the website is to get them to do something. If we're writing content and people aren't taking that action, I'm not doing my job as the SEO.

If something isn't working, an old page or an old plan, don't hold on to it.

The technical fix isn't the finish line

So the technical fix isn't the finish line. Have the content ready when it lands, refresh before you add, and build every page to get someone to act. Where you start depends on your budget, and that's the next video.

If you run marketing at a startup and want to get in front of more of your buyers in Google and in AI answers, start here.

Sources

Shown in the video, with the dates given there:

• AI crawlers and JavaScript: Vercel and MERJ, The rise of the AI crawler, December 2024.
• 40% expected, 45% reported less low-quality, unoriginal content: Google, March 2024 core update, via Search Engine Land, April 2024.
• Cited sites changing month to month: Profound, July 2025.
• AI search visits and signups on one site: Ahrefs' own site, June 2025, via PPC Land.
• The case study numbers are from the company's own Google Search Console, February to July 2026.