Interview with Ihor Lavrenenko, SEO Manager, Pesty Marketing

This interview is with Ihor Lavrenenko, SEO Manager, Pesty Marketing.

Ihor, for readers meeting you for the first time, how do you describe what you do in digital marketing for startups today?

I tell founders I work at the messy intersection of growth, product, and data. My job is to turn noisy acquisition and retention problems into simple experiments. That can mean rebuilding tracking, fixing landing pages, or rewiring lifecycle emails.

With early-stage teams, I often sit closer to the roadmap than the "marketing" box because channel performance usually mirrors product clarity.

Day to day, I focus on three loops:

Get sharper on who you serve,
Ship small tests fast,
Then double down where numbers move, not where opinions feel strong.

Lately, that includes a lot of AI-assisted content and UGC, because those formats still punch above their weight in 2025 performance data: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics.

Looking back, what pivotal decision most shaped your path into specialized digital marketing for startups?

I said no to a comfortable generalist role at a big agency and joined a tiny startup as their first growth hire. The timing was the worst. The product was half-baked, and the budget was thin. However, I had to own the whole funnel, which forced me to learn analytics, copy, onboarding, and pricing in the same quarter.

That decision hurt in the short term but shaped everything that came after. I saw how fragile early-stage growth is and how specific the skill set needs to be. Since then, I have stayed close to startups and performance data, which current 2025 marketing benchmarks continue to validate.

Building on that focus, what single signal told you it was time to specialize rather than be “everything for everyone”?

The signal was boredom. Not burnout, just a flat line in my own curiosity. I noticed I was excited before calls with early-stage SaaS teams and half awake before "do everything" requests from random industries. The work paid the same, but the energy was different. That was hard to ignore.

At some point, I looked at my notes and saw a pattern. My best results, happiest clients, and clearest playbooks all sat in one bucket: early tech and product-led teams. So I leaned into that and dropped the rest.

From your free teardown approach, what one repeatable step should a startup include in a no-frills audit to raise close rates?

I force the founder to write one clear promise plus one clear next step above the fold on their main landing page. One promise, one call to action (CTA), one target persona. Then, match that exact promise in the first 30 seconds of their demo or sales call. When those two moments align, close rates usually improve.

I have watched startups chase new channels while this basic alignment remains broken. Traffic grows, the pipeline looks full, yet deals still fail due to confusion. Fixing that headline to link with the talk track has given us the fastest win in most teardowns. Recent data on message clarity and conversion supports what I keep observing in the field.

Treating SEO like product development, what is the first experiment a startup should run to tie a page to a revenue hypothesis?

I treat the first SEO experiment like a tiny product launch. Pick one high-intent query that sounds like money, not research. For example, choose “SOC 2 compliance software pricing” rather than “what is SOC 2.” Ship a focused page that answers that query, shows one crystal-clear offer, and has a single primary CTA that leads to a demo or trial.

Then connect that CTA straight into your CRM with proper UTM tags. The hypothesis is simple: If this page gets 200 qualified visits, we should see X trials and Y pipeline dollars.

To test quickly, I often send a small burst of paid search or a warm email segment before organic traffic kicks in. Watch lead quality, not just form fills. If the page turns visits into revenue at a healthy rate, you just earned the right to build the full content cluster around it.

For AI answer engines like Perplexity and SGE, what one practical tactic helped you gain visibility that a startup can try in its first 90 days?

I'm treating Perplexity and SGE like picky editors and giving them one perfect home base page. We took a painful, money-adjacent buyer question, wrote a deep but clear guide around it, added concrete examples, screenshots, FAQ blocks, and schema, then checked weekly which lines got quoted back to us. Within a few weeks, our URL started showing up in Perplexity answers for people who had never heard of us.

A startup can copy that in 90 days. Pick one high-intent question you want to own, publish the clearest guide on the internet, tag it with clean semantic HTML, FAQ schema, and obvious headings, then prompt answer engines like a QA test to see where you land. I tweak structure and clarity, not just keywords, based on those runs.

A study on answer engine citations backs this focus on page quality and markup: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10762

Translating your healthcare work to startups, what one tactic most reliably turns reviews and service pages into high-intent leads?

The tactic that moved the needle most in healthcare, and now in startups, is pairing every key service page with what I call a proof path. Not a lonely testimonials section at the bottom. I pull three to five reviews that mention specific outcomes, match each one to a core benefit on the page, and place them right next to the form or phone number. People see the promise and the proof in the same blink.

For a SaaS startup, I treat it the same way. Your “features” page should not just say faster onboarding or fewer tickets. It should show a short, skimmable quote for each claim, using the exact words your customers use in public reviews and case studies. Then, I connect that section to a single, clear next step: book a demo, start a trial, or talk to sales. That tiny alignment shifts visitors from browsing to acting.

On design and speed, what single brand system element has saved you the most time while keeping campaigns on-brand?

We have a small library of “ready to ship” modules, not full templates. These include:

Hero
Testimonial strip
Feature row
Pricing block
FAQ
A couple of CTAs

All of these are built once with locked typography, spacing, and colors. We keep them in Figma and in the actual CMS, so design and implementation speak the same language. This approach has eliminated 80 percent of the pixel-pushing debates.

When a new campaign lands, I am not staring at a blank page. I just drag three or four modules into a rough flow, tweak the copy and imagery, and ship. Because the guardrails live inside the modules, junior teammates can move quickly without breaking the brand on every second screen.

For early ROI clarity, what one dashboard you trust should a founder set up on day one to track what matters?

I always push founders to set up one boring but honest funnel by channel. One view. Columns for source, spend, visitors, signups or demos, qualified opportunities, and closed revenue. Rows by week. No vanity metrics. If something cannot land in that table, it is probably not real growth yet.

You do not need a fancy tool on day one. A simple Looker Studio or even a spreadsheet wired to Stripe and your CRM works. That dashboard earns trust because it forces hard questions:

Why did this channel bring cheap traffic but zero calls?
Why did referral volume drop when a feature shipped?
Why did one email suddenly boost the pipeline?

When you review that same view every Monday, patterns show up quickly, and arguments about tactics get shorter. The rule is simple: If it does not move the funnel, it is a distraction.