Breaking down Danny Postma's SEO strategy for HeadshotPro: $300k+ in 1 year

We all know @dannypostma is seeing crazy success ($300,000+) w/ HeadshotPro and the rest of his portfolio of AI products since selling his previous company.

At first I assumed it was all from AI hype.

Then I heard Danny mention on the Indie Hackers pod last week that he uses SEO to drive traffic.

So I did some digging to find out how.

Ranking in 10 top for high-volume keywords

First thing I found: Headshot gets 3k monthly organic visitors. How?

For one, he's ranking in top 10 for "professional headshots," which has:

• 🔎 Monthly search volume: 21k
• 🤙 Keyword Difficulty: 23
• Plus 193 other keywords (a lot also with good search volume)

The kicker? He did this in under 3 months:

Ok wow. How did he do that?

Two-Pronged SEO Approach

He used a two-pronged approach:

1. Programmatic SEO

By generating 200+ pages for different cities and counties (aka programmatic SEO), Danny ranked for long-tail keywords like:

• "professional headshots san francisco"
• "professional headshots boston"

2. Writing blog posts targeting this keyword

Notice a trend in these titles?

"Ok," you say, "but only he can do this because he has a high domain rating."

Eh, not necessarily true. He has a domain rating of 44, which is good (the 21,000 backlinks help). But it's not unattainable. It looks like he pretty much started at 35 when he launched, probably getting a good chunk of backlinks and referring domains from his launch on Product Hunt and elsewhere.

Then in April the real backlinks came in. It's not clear if he went out and sought them, or if they came naturally as his product became more well-known and referred to.

Luckily Danny chimed in to my tweet and filled in the gaps of how he did this:

Either way, this is the quickest ROI on SEO I've seen. Usually it takes months for Google to figure out how to position your listing.

My Takeaways:

• Programmatic SEO is the fast way
• SEO via individual blog posts is the slow way
• Doing both compounds your results
• Go all in on a good topic

Fun thing I found:

I think this all started with him messing around with AI-generated profile pictures in February?

and now the shameless plug bcuz i spent a lot of time writing this.

I have a free SEO resource, Honest Guide to SEO for IndieMakers specifically for indie makers. It doesn't cover programmatic, just individual blog writing for keywords, but it's a good "get off the ground" guide.