Hello! My name is Humberto Valle, I'm a 10 year vet in the marketing and strategy world. I am the current CEO of www.Unthink.me, evangelist for a 100 Software Engineer community called BetaBulls and work with startups and large corporations from many countries.

I have been involved with SEO one way or another for many years now, and as you may already know there are a lot of tools available - some free some carrying a high price - but ultimately what things come down to is your value for each of these tools. For example, we use Hubspot and SpyFu primarily for content and SEO driven growth - works wonders for us. One of the key factors to our success is that I created a strategy to follow for our SEO efforts more so than just saying" we want more traffic, lets find the keywords in our industry and match them - No, what we did was pair the right keywords for a very small niche (small innovative business owners who run service based businesses) and the content we create, the places where we promote (paid traffic influences SEO as well), me being here responding, was all intentional to position a real person around a team - to this day we get hire because someone reads an article I wrote years ago, or a response I wrote here years ago... They email me or my team, schedule a call and hire us because of my first exposure to them as a person --> they found it with the help o SEO.

There is a new tool http://www.maaxmarket.com/ that offers low-cost SEO help - but it's NEW. So beware.
When it comes to content driven growth, what you need to focus on is the value you are providing to your target audience through your content and then lastly making it available to them through a well thought out delivery plan - such as social media channels, scheduling, headlines, cycles, imagery, calls to action, etc. etc.

Content is always good right, but also consider that sometimes in order to achieve growth in an already crowded market place you may have to recur to non-traditional marketing efforts to stand out. Depending on what your startup offers, you may be better off not focusing initially on SEO and instead achieve high exposure some other creative way. SEO in itself takes time to build, so good content and creative ways to deliver a message are way more important factors than SEO.

Thank you for reading, I hope I've provided some clarity and guidance. If you need further help, please don't hesitate to contact me directly.
Humberto Valle
www.unthink.me
humberto@unthink.me
www.linkedin.com/in/humbertovalle