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JOURNAL — 004 · SEO

# The Founder's Guide to SEO That Actually Pays

SL Sara Lindqvist, Head of Growth · June 12, 2026 · 7 min read

Most SEO reporting is theatre. Here's how to evaluate SEO like an investment: the three buckets that matter, the timelines that are honest, and the questions that expose bad retainers.

Founders get sold SEO weekly, and most of what gets sold is activity: audits PDF'd and forgotten, blogs no buyer reads, reports full of arrows pointing up and to the right of nothing. Here's the framework we use internally — and what we'd ask any agency, including us.

## The three buckets that matter

- Technical integrity — can search engines crawl, render, index and understand the site? This is finite work with a finish line.
- Demand-mapped content — pages that answer the exact queries your buyers make at each funnel stage, in the formats that rank.
- Authority — links and mentions from sites your buyers and Google already trust. Earning these is PR, not spreadsheet outreach.

Everything an SEO program does should bill to one of those buckets, and every bucket should report into a business metric: qualified organic sessions, pipeline, revenue.

## Timeline honesty

Technical wins surface in 2–6 weeks. Content starts compounding between months 3 and 6 for most B2B/e-commerce sites, faster in local and niche verticals, slower in categories where you're fighting Wikipedia and the IRS. Anyone promising page-one in 30 days is either picking fights with zero-volume keywords or playing with tactics that end in manual actions.

> SEO is the only channel where the asset appreciates: the article you publish today can deposit pipeline for five years. But it compounds like savings, not like lottery.Growth team memo

## Questions that expose weak retainers

Ask: which five pages drive the most organic revenue and what are you doing about them this month? What did you ship last month — not analyze, ship? How do you attribute pipeline to organic? If the answers are dashboards and nouns instead of shipped work and verbs, you have your answer.

Budget guidance: under $1.5k/mo, buy a technical audit and a roadmap instead of a retainer. Real programs — technical + content + authority — start there and compound from it. Cheap SEO is the most expensive kind.

SEO ALIFY Journal 7 min read
SL
Sara Lindqvist
Head of Growth · ALIFY

Part of the senior team behind 250+ launches across the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Writes from the field, not from other blogs.

Keep reading

## More from the journal.

SEO October 10, 2025 4 min read SEO After AI Overviews: What Still Works in 2026 Clicks are scarcer and informational queries are eaten first. What the data from 40+ managed sites says about where organic traffic still comes from — and where it's gone for good. Read article SEO October 19, 2025 4 min read Topical Authority: The Cluster Strategy That Compounds Why thirty interlinked articles outrank three hundred scattered ones — the pillar/cluster architecture we build for clients, with the internal-linking maths. Read article SEO October 4, 2025 4 min read Multi-Location Local SEO Without Duplicate Content Ten branches shouldn't mean ten near-identical pages. The location-page framework that ranks in every city without tripping doorway-page filters. Read article
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