Here’s a more humanized paraphrase:
Our little directory is now seeing over 136,000 monthly visitors, up from just 31,000 a month ago. Not many people realize the power of SEO, both for driving sales and discovering SaaS ideas. It’s a real treasure trove.
I made a Reddit post about how we use a simple Excel spreadsheet to create blogs at scale. Each blog costs about $0.05, compared to the average $0.89 for a typical SEO blog service.
Since then, we’ve improved our process: we now generate each blog three times faster, and the spreadsheet even finds related YouTube videos to embed in the content. While we can’t yet create contextual anchor texts for internal and external links, we’re working on it.
Here’s how it works: I input keywords or links to other blogs in column A, run our 12 app scripts, and each script generates different elements like titles, meta descriptions, alt texts, body text, FAQs, and more.
Many of you asked me to share this tool, so I created a dummy version of the spreadsheet for you.Now, here are some more insights into our website ranking:
- We’ve grown our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to $1,150 from $940. Startups pay us to be listed in the directory, display ads, and get featured.
- Our monthly visitors have skyrocketed to 136,000, and our SEO progress is impressive. Here’s proof of our growth.
- Our Domain Rating (DR) is currently 38, down from 40, which took us 2.5 months to achieve.
- We have 91 referring domains, up from 83, with 88% being do-follow, and 706 backlinks.
Now, let me share how we find great SEO keywords. In my opinion, Semrush is slightly better than Ahrefs for this purpose. Semrush PRO has great filters for keywords, and its free version is equivalent to Ahrefs’ $27/month plan.
You can use the wildcard in both tools to discover long-tail keywords, which is crucial. I start by searching for solution-oriented keywords (check out the list below for ideas) and add at the end so Semrush can complete the long-tail variants.
These long-tail keywords often relate to different brands (like Reddit, YouTube, Canva), industries (HR, copywriting, hairstyling), activities (weddings, camping), and specific products (like coffee machines).
This approach helps narrow down to a clear niche.
Here’s a sneak peek at some keyword ideas:
- “checklist”
- “template”
- “guide”
- “how to”
- “recommendations”
- “suggestions”
- “pdf”
- “create”
I explore a lot of these solution-seeking keywords, filtering results to aim for a keyword difficulty (KD) of 0-15 and a search volume of over 1,000. I then cherry-pick the best ones for content creation.
Also, examining competitor keywords and filtering for 0-15 KD can work, though many people do this.
Once I have my keywords, I use our spreadsheet to generate about 35-40 blogs at once. That’s our strategy for reaching over 136,000 monthly visitors and over $1,000 in MRR.
You can use this same method to uncover micro SaaS ideas too!
Here’s another valuable tip about backlinks:
- If your DR is 0-10, aim for 10-20 DR backlinks, using free directories as your go-to.
- With a DR of 10-20, focus on getting 20-30 DR backlinks. Guest posts work well here—join indie hacker communities to find opportunities. Backlink exchanges can help too, but if you’re desperate, paying might be necessary.
- If your DR is 30+, start looking for 30-40 DR backlinks. This is when buying backlinks might become relevant.
Avoid using private blog networks (PBNs); they can harm your site. Don’t exceed 3-4 new backlinks a month, as Google watches for backlink schemes.
If you use Notion, create a public page and allow Google to index it, adding a link to your main SaaS. This gives you a strong do-follow link. Similarly, you can do this with Beehiiv posts, Product Hunt launches, and various startup submission sites.
I hope this helps inspire some of you! I share all these SEO insights regularly, so stay tuned!
Let me know if you need any changes or further adjustments!