Leo Alho, building Tableport as a contract CTO, published a no-frills SEO checklist for founders who need visibility but lack budgets for paid tools.
The essentials: Create sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and llms.txt files. Add the site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (import from Google to save time). Verify indexation and resolve crawl issues. Add metadata (titles, descriptions, JSON-LD, OpenGraph) to key pages. Run Google Lighthouse audits periodically.
For analytics, Alho moved away from Google Analytics and Posthog to self-hosted options. He settled on Umami over Plausible CE because Umami uses less RAM (Plausible's ClickHouse backend can consume 500MB) and offers simpler user management. Both are cookieless and GDPR-compliant without consent popups, which matters for lean operations.
The llms.txt inclusion is notable. While traditional SEO focuses on Google's crawler, AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini) increasingly surface content. A growing view in 2026 SEO is that startups should prioritize "entity trust" and answer-first content for AI overviews, not just meta tag optimization.
Alho runs Lighthouse as a global npm package rather than integrating it into CI/CD. His reasoning: overkill for early stage. That trade-off reflects a broader pattern in startup SEO. Move fast on foundations (sitemaps, HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, Core Web Vitals). Skip the expensive tooling until traffic justifies it.
The approach works if you accept the constraints. Google Search Console provides enough data to spot indexation problems and track organic growth. Self-hosted analytics keep costs low. The risk: no automated monitoring means issues can go unnoticed longer than they would with paid platforms.
The checklist is pragmatic. It won't compete with enterprise SEO stacks, but it gets a startup visible without burning runway on Ahrefs subscriptions. For technical founders who treat SEO as a necessary chore rather than a specialty, this is the minimum viable setup.