The SEO maturity curve helps you assess where your organization stands. Whether you’re focused on basic optimizations or operating at a fully integrated, C-level-supported, data-driven level. Achieving SEO maturity requires dedicated resources and a relentless commitment to building programs that drive sustainable revenue growth for the long term. While tactical execution fuels success across the different levels, it’s equally important to step back, take a breath, and benchmark your progress to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. Different companies have different needs & there is no guarantee that leveling up in SEO maturity leads to success, as it will depend on the execution of the individual areas.

💡 Does this sound like a winning SEO program? A team of five is optimizing content and translating it into six languages, making it accessible through guides, audio, and video formats. Your engineering team has completed five new SEO integrations, your PR agency has secured 100 top-tier mentions in the past week, and you’re preparing to launch content in a new vertical.

When starting a new SEO program or integrating an existing one, reality rarely matches the perfect scenario described above. Mature companies face their own unique challenges in supporting growth, and that’s fine. You’ll have to grow into it because starting from scratch with this scenario doesn’t work, you haven’t build the muscle to support it.

High Maturity ≠ Success but Scale unlocks Success

The SEO maturity framework serves as a comprehensive guide to identify opportunities across key areas like organizational support, technical infrastructure, content optimization, and brand authority. Rather than treating it as a rigid checklist, use it to understand which elements will drive the most impact for your business. While companies typically progress through different maturity stages over time, success comes from strategically investing in the areas that align with your goals and resources – not trying to do everything at once. During my time at The Next Web it made much more sense, over time, to focus on structuring our data & experimentation at scale. However, when I joined Postmates and there was no web platform whatsoever we had to start with implementing the best practices first (while other teams were launching national PR & brand campaigns we benefited from).

What sets ‘ The Best ’ apart in SEO?

The best SEO programs are optimizing well beyond best practices as their organizations support it by providing headcount, budgets to create more structure, content and build the brand. This often means that SEO isn’t responsible for all of it but that SEO is taken into account

Where do you find companies that excel in SEO? The answer often lies in how important SEO is to their business fundamentals (often the combination of a large TAM and lower AOV and/or having the need for a low-CAC channel). Think: Redfin/Zillow, Instacart, Uber, or in travel: Booking.com and Expedia.

Organizational Strategy & Support; Enabling SEO Support

As a startup founder, you’re initially responsible for developing and executing your SEO strategy. Once you achieve product-market fit, you may accelerate your efforts by hiring an individual contributor (IC) dedicated to SEO. As your company grows into the Growth and Late stages, you can build larger teams focused solely on scaling your SEO program. Depending on the channel’s importance, other teams within the organization may also contribute to SEO efforts at this stage.

• Strategy; In the early stages, it’s important to grow. When you become more established, do you know what you’re going after, with what purpose and objective? Having answers to these questions is what guides SEO strategy.
• Resourcing; Focusing on SEO, early on, means that the founder or a marketer is responsible for it and that a small website is maintained externally (often). With more success, more resourcing becomes available. This allows companies often to scale to an in-house individual contributor for SEO with more specialized resources.
• Learning & Development; How much are you learning, how are you building up expertise within certain areas of SEO, how are you avoiding tunnel vision? The more mature you get the more knowledge you’ll built up internally and can gather via external subject-matter experts.
• Cross-Functional; The efforts for SEO span across many teams (PR, Social, Product, Corporate Development) as all their efforts could help pay off in the other areas: Technical, Content/Relevance & Authority.
• M&A; Assume you could buy direct competitors, or any ‘opponent’ that you’re facing in SEO. Guess what? In late stage or being well capitalized (through funding) gives you this opportunity. This is the job of corporate development, developing strategies for inorganic growth. But often they lead to significant (scale) advantages for SEO teams as well.

Building Tech Infrastructure for Scalable SEO

In the early stages, you’ll likely start with landing pages or a basic foundation on a platform like WordPress. As your business grows and your product evolves, you gain more flexibility to tailor it for SEO. This allows you to implement more advanced integrations, leverage SERP features, run experiments, and improve reporting capabilities.

• Website Structure; As your site’s scale grows, maintaining a well-organized structure is crucial for both user experience and crawlability. Early on, a simple hierarchy with clear navigation is easy, but at scale, you’ll need to implement a scalable taxonomy that efficiently organizes categories, subcategories, and individual pages. Logical URL structures, breadcrumb navigation, and automated internal linking systems become essential for ensuring search engines can efficiently discover*.*
• Experimentation; SEO is never a one-size-fits-all approach, and experimentation is key to long-term success. Early-stage testing may involve A/B testing headlines or optimizing meta tags, but as your SEO program matures, you’ll need a structured approach to experimentation. This includes deploying controlled SEO tests, measuring the impact of content changes, testing different page structures, and refining your internal linking algorithms. Large-scale testing platforms and custom-built experimentation frameworks can help you validate hypotheses without negatively impacting rankings.
• Structured Data; Leveraging structured data (Schema.org) enables search engines to better understand your content and display rich snippets in SERPs. In the early stages, basic structured data for key pages (e.g., products, reviews, FAQs) can improve visibility. As you scale, implementing structured data across thousands or millions of pages programmatically allows you to take full advantage of SERP features like featured snippets, knowledge panels, and enhanced local results. Automating schema markup updates and integrating structured data into your content management system becomes critical and will set you up for success with LLMs for future purposes.
• Measurement & Reporting; Tracking SEO performance requires more than just monitoring rankings. Initially, simple tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics provide insights into organic traffic and keyword performance. As SEO efforts expand, custom dashboards, log file analysis, and advanced attribution modeling help measure the impact of various SEO levers. Building a centralized SEO data pipeline enables you to monitor indexing, crawl efficiency, and user behavior at scale, providing the insights needed to fine-tune strategies and drive long-term growth. On the business side at a Late stage you’ll start thinking about Reporting Frameworks for SEO for Boards & Investors and other investment thesis-like topics.

Optimizing Content for Relevancy

In the early stages, you’ll likely be the primary content creator. Over time, you can bring in writers and encourage contributions from others in your organization. As you grow, you can accelerate content production through programmatic SEO while expanding into different formats like audio, video, and photography. With a more mature team, you’ll have the capacity to experiment, refine strategies, and launch new verticals based on keyword research and customer insights.

• Content Creation; Starting with writing 1-2 posts a week or creating a couple of landing pages will get you started. It doesn’t scale. So deploying programmatic SEO is a good way to enable this.
• Content Structure; Programmatic SEO only gets you so far as you can create landing pages for every geography or product category a marketplace covers. But you’ll need more depth and context to help the user. So, over time, you’ll have to branch out and leverage AI in some instances to deliver this insight. Providing the proper content structure & capabilities within a content management system will come into play here as it’s about enabling a content team to update content across, sometimes, millions of pages & products.
• Keyword Focus; Most founders are obsessed on ranking for their core keywords. But with no authority, a lack of content & relevancy it’s often near impossible. So focusing on more long-tail keywords and driving scale often helps them more as eventually it will allow them to compete for keywords. At Postmates we wouldn’t rank for ‘food delivery’ out right but could rank top 5 for: food delivery {food category} near me’ instantly after deploying pages.
• Internal Linking; Anyone can manually link pages together, at scale you’ll have to find better ways to do this. Because you’ll have to agree on what ‘relevant’ means. In a case at Postmates we wanted to optimize top keywords, at the same time however it’s clear that Los Angeles for food delivery isn’t relevant to New York. Building systems that can optimize this at scale is hard work and requires lots of experimentation.
• Content Formats; At low volume of content you can easily transform content into multiple formats for social, video & audio. At scale you’ll need to build out many more capabilities to do so and you might not always start with a written content first approach. At large scale this is merely impossible to get right. But imagine the flywheel it can create to build a brand…

Authority: Building a Brand…. for SEO?

In the early stages, authority building often start with personal outreach, networking, and securing initial mentions through existing relationships. As you grow, you can invest in more structured PR efforts, securing media coverage, and partnerships to strengthen your authority. In later stages, with a more established brand, you can scale through data-driven PR campaigns, strategic collaborations, and thought leadership content. Your team will have the ability to experiment with different media relations, outreach strategies, leverage PR at scale, and integrate authority-building efforts with broader marketing & brand initiatives.

• Linkbuilding; I’ll call it this as the effort will look like this early on when you’re leveraging existing relationships to have some links placed. This should quickly evolve into different strategies where the efforts are much more ‘organic’ as it will help scale.
• PR; You’ll want to reach more people, expand your SAM and open up opportunities for the media to learn about your brand in a category. You won’t be able to achieve that by going after 1 media outlet at a time. You’ll have to put out thought leadership type content to achieve this, often supported by media relations. At scale you’ll get this done by hiring a PR agency but even that doesn’t need to break the bank immediately.
• Brand Marketing; It has been a decade, but remember the famous Airbnb Berlin Wall use case? You can’t do this, but imagine how well a good performing brand marketing effort can support SEO.