SEO doesn't have to be hard — here's how to get started, and my current stats.

SEO doesn't have to be hard!

I've seen a lot of posts recently on IH about SEO, so I wanted to share my SEO approach for my SaaS side-project, why I'm focusing on SEO, what it all means, and how you can get started too.

Note: I'm still pretty new to SEO! The image from below is the current stats for MONN, my side project. We're not even a month in yet! Even so, I've started to see some early results.

I'm no SEO expert, so this might be a bit of a noob perspective. But I want to show you that it's actually pretty easy to get started and get some traffic trickling in.

Here are the current stats for MONN —

Why SEO?

You probably already know a bit about SEO, and you know you should probably start a blog to "do SEO". You also know it's going to take a "long time" to see results, so you don't bother.

I've had the same perspective in the past with previous side projects.

This time, though, I decided I would commit to the project long-term, and get my SEO growth engine started early. I've actually been pleasantly surprised with the initial results — with only a handful of articles on a new domain, with 0 initial backlinks, I'm starting to see impressions rise, and clicks trickle in.

SEO isn't the right choice for everyone though! It might not be the right choice for you. Some apps have viral growth built-in, while others can get great results from PPC ads.

I decided to go all in on SEO because I think it fits with my product, and because I actually enjoy writing articles and hunting for good keywords.

How to SEO

I've started treating SEO like a bit of a game in my head (I love incremental games, so maybe this has something to do with it...)

When we're focusing on SEO, we've got 2 main aims, and 1 meta-aim —

Main aims -

1. Find good keywords to target in our content
2. Write content that is both useful and informative, which happens to target those keywords we found.

Meta aim —

1. Share, promote or distribute our existing content to build up backlinks to our site.

It's kind of like a loop —

This is a pretty typical feedback loop, and the key thing about this one is that it just takes a long time to get going! That's what people mean when they say SEO is slow — you're starting from 0, and trying to build up heaps of articles and backlinks to soak up as much SEO juice as possible.

So how do we actually do it? How do we "do SEO"?

1. Find some keywords

Easy, right? Well.... sometimes, it actually is.

There's a great free tool from Ahrefs to help us figure out what keywords to target — Ahrefs Keyword Generator

Literally, just start typing in words and phrases related to your app/SaaS/info product/whatever, and see what comes up.

Green = good ✅
Red = bad ❌

Ideally, if you're creative and lucky, you'll be able to find keywords like this —

Keyword difficulty (KD) of 0, and 500 searches/month. (Don't ask me how I managed to find this. If I was this good at finding keywords for my actual SaaS, I'd be about to IPO by now).

What does KD mean?

If you're a fresh site, with DR:0 (DR=domain rank, basically how much weight search engines give your site. Higher DR = easier to rank for keywords, and you appear higher up in search. DR goes from 0-100), you're basically starting from nothing.

Your website has no reputation, and no backlinks. It just kind of ... exists. To be able to have any chance of ranking for a keyword, you're going to need to find ones that have very low difficulty (ie: not many other authoritative websites targeting this keyword).

So just play around, type in queries, and see what you come up with. You'll be surprised at what comes up.

My SaaS, MONN, is related to cloud monitoring and infrastructure, so I was searching around terms like -

• cloud monitoring
• deployment monitoring
• vercel monitoring
• heroku logging

etc etc.

Here's a more concrete example for a specific article — MONN is a SaaS monitoring tool to help founders monitor their cloud services and infrastructure. MONN also uses Ruby on Rails as its backend framework.

Personally, I think people who are familiar with Ruby on Rails have a much-better-than-average chance of also finding MONN a useful service, so I've been writing tutorial posts for different aspects of Ruby on Rails.

MONN sends emails to a user if it detects that any of their cloud services are down, so I'd been playing around with ActionMailer and connected it to SendGrid internally.

One day, I was playing around with the Ahrefs keyword generator tool (remember how I told you to just play around with it and type random stuff in?).

I typed in sendgrid rails and I saw —

I found a few other keywords like this, all related to ActionMailer, all with low KD. So I decided to write an article.

Note: Ideally you would find better keywords. KD < 10, searches/month 100-500. I decided to write this article anyway because 1. I found quite a few low-difficulty, low-volume, related keywords, 2. I was curious to learn more about ActionMailer while researching the article, so I was OK with poor results.

I wrote the following article — Refactoring a Rails App to Use ActionMailer for transactional email

It started appearing on Google —

And I started getting search impressions and clicks —

It's just that easy, right? ...not quite, but almost.

Meta-aim — backlink building

I wrote this blog post and published it to the world. Unfortunately, with such a low domain rank, it basically doesn't exist in Google (or other search engines).

So, we have to go out and get some backlinks to our article to —

1. help Google even know we exist, and be able to find it amongst everything else on the internet.
2. prove to Google that this article is worth showing in search results.

Backlinks are links to your content from other websites. Any link at all is technically a backlink, but not all backlinks are the same.

The only ones that actually matter to Google are the ones it's told to "follow". The person or website posting your link can decide whether to make their link to your website a "dofollow" or "nofollow". Only your "dofollow" links contribute to your domain authority.

You can actually investigate this right now. Open up your browser developer (usually F12) tools, and use the inspect element tool to inspect this link >>> MONN — Cloud monitoring for SaaS.

You'll see something like this —

  <a href="https://monn.app" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">MONN — Cloud monitoring for SaaS</a>

IndieHackers automatically inserts a "nofollow" to its links, presumably to prevent link spam.

So how did I get some backlinks? I got a bit lucky.

In the Ruby on Rails niche, there are some great blog aggregators and newsletters that will post your article and link back to your website. So I posted my ActionMailer article to one of them, and got a few tiny backlinks —

Note: get comfortable with this tool — Ahrefs Backlink Checker. Like the keyword tool, you want to spend a lot of time playing around with this.

A domain rank of 0.8 is pretty abysmal! Luckily, it doesn't take much to rank for keywords with a difficulty of 0.

** The reason why backlink building is a meta-aim is this — **

The domain authority of your root domain (monn.app in my case) is boosted by backlinks to other pages on its domain (ie: our blog articles on monn.app/blog/...).

In turn, the domain authority of our root domain boosts the domain authority of our blog articles! This is the feedback loop from before.

By continuing to post articles and get backlinks, we can slowly build our domain rank. Building our domain rank moves us up the search results, so more people see, share, and link to our content. More links to our content move us even further up the search results! And we continue ad infinitum.

Conclusion

That... was a lot.

I didn't realize I had that much to say about SEO.

I hope though that I've been able to demystify it a bit for you — it wasn't until I started actually building SEO for MONN that this process and feedback loop started to form in my head.

I also hope that you found this article useful! This is the article I wish I had to introduce me to SEO. The process itself isn't hard — basically, you just need to find some keywords and write a lot.

The hard part (in my opinion) is being able to write consistently, and being OK with slow results and a long ramp to decent results.

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have as well, just comment them below. Thanks!