Building an SEO Function From Scratch at a Fintech Startup

I joined Planet Wealth with no SEO history to build on. The site had a young domain, almost no backlinks, and a name nobody had searched for. It was also a US-regulated equity crowdfunding platform, which meant every claim on the site had to survive a compliance review before it went live. That combination changes how you approach SEO. You can't just publish fast and iterate. You have to be right the first time, more often than not. Here's what I actually did, in the order that mattered. Start with the site, not the content Before I wrote a single blog post, I audited the technical foundation. I found canonical and sitemap mismatches, and a handful of orphan pages that weren't linked from anywhere on the site. None of this is glamorous work. But a content plan built on top of a broken technical foundation wastes effort. Fix the pipes before you turn on the water. Pick a narrow set of terms you can actually win A new domain in a regulated industry cannot compete for the broad, high-volume terms that bigger platforms already own. I picked a narrow set of specific, lower-competition terms tied to how equity crowdfunding actually works, and built content that answered those questions better than anything else ranking for them. This is slower than chasing volume, but it's how a new site earns trust with search engines that have no history to go on. Authority isn't something you claim in your copy. It's something search engines infer from behavior over time: who links to you, who cites you, and whether people who land on your page stay. Treat backlink outreach as a content problem, not an email problem Most backlink outreach fails because the content behind it isn't worth linking to. I spent more time making sure each piece had something genuinely citable, a clear stat, a clean explainer, a useful breakdown, than I spent on the outreach templates themselves. The Domain Rating tripled in three months. That wasn't from volume of outreach emails. It was from having fewer things worth linking to, done well. Write for the compliance review, not around it Early on, I treated compliance as a blocker. That was the wrong frame. Once I understood exactly what claims needed evidence and what language triggered a flag, I could write copy that cleared review on the first pass, most of the time. This mattered more than any keyword tool. A published page beats a perfect draft stuck in review. The AI Overview citation One of the pages we built eventually earned a citation in an AI Overview for a core, non-branded industry search term. That's a zero-click result, someone gets the answer without visiting the site, but it's also a signal. It means the content was judged clear and trustworthy enough to be quoted directly. In a market where fewer clicks are going to any single result, being the source an AI system reaches for is becoming its own kind of ranking. What I'd tell someone doing this for the first time Fix the technical foundation before you write anything. Pick a narrow set of terms you can actually win, not the ones with the biggest volume. Make outreach easy by making the content worth linking to in the first place. And if you're in a regulated space, learn the compliance rules well enough to write around them from the start, not after the fact.