SEO is a waste of time for (most) indie hackers

Cool post!

As someone who works in a marketing agency as an SEO specialist, I saw a few types of companies/individuals:

• Ones that never cared about SEO and just wrote generic content to their blog
• Ones who care about SEO but never really knew how to do it right
• Ones who care about SEO and have done it from day one and knew what they are doing

The companies/individuals that cared about SEO and did it from day one had much better traffic and lead flow.

I work mostly with SaaS companies, and I know that indie hackers' SEO is different, but I think the fundamental reasons behind it are the same.

Indie hackers need to think on the long run. You can be very creative now, write viral articles, bring leads using growth hacks, and have a spike of traffic to your site. But at one point, it will fade, and you'll need to use your creativity again, turning the entire indie hacker life more like survival mode.

SEO might be slow and time-consuming, but it's a method you can count on in the long run if done right.

I recently published a SaaS SEO guide that can give useful insights for anyone who cares about SEO:

https://growtika.com/saas-seo/

Great guide! I like to think about SEO as our base camp. As soon as the product is validated we cover the keywords we believe we can rank for in 3-6 months.

Then we focus on doing things that don't scale. Going on LI and connecting with potential users and listening to them, answering questions on Reddit and listening to relevant conversations, and the same on Quora. And plugging our SEO pages when it makes sense.

Of course, every product is different but most of them can benefit from a "little bit of SEO" which plays the role of connecting all other growth activities and making them multiply.

It's also easy to turn SEO-based LPs / blogs into videos and TikTok. You've already done your research :)

btw. for the use case above - we've decided to build a side project so we can jump into every relevant conversion on Reddit. It's called Surfkey and it sends you a notification every time someone mentions a relevant keyword. Great for early-stage growth as well as learning about the problem space.

Hey James,
this is maybe THE BEST summary of what SEO is and at which stage to use it, that I have read, like EVER! Posts from any SEO "gurus" included.

I wanted to thank you for putting this awesome guide together! This is really helpful to SEO newbies and anyone trying to better understand the different aspects!

Personally, I might be biased about the effectiveness of SEO as I have developed https://vispr.net which is a SEO WordPress plugin that solves SEO with do-follow backlinks through UNIQUE ready-made partner directory pages.

As most Indiehackers will not even use WordPress for their projects, this might not be a working solution for most people here, but as someone intimate with SEO I still need to second everything James says here.

SEO makes NO SENSE if done too early!

SEO is a long-term game and you should NEVER expect immediate results. If you need to evaluate your project quickly, either use community feedback of your perfect target audience or use a limited budget for paid ads to verify interest in what you are doing.

As you mentioned context is super important. If there is nothing to relate to, even backlinks may run into a dead end.

Something that most people and SEO newbies do not realize is that the main purpose of the Google Search is to END the search asap and find the best solution to the query. Which means, that generic and broad keywords that address a general topic are completely useless.

But most people are using generic keywords that do not describe their product or offer a solution. Even worse, if you do this, then you need to compete with everyone else using the same (limited) keywords. Instead use long-tail search phrases as keywords and you are seeing better results.

Compare for yourself and think about what might get you better results:

"Fitness"
vs.
"Nike Dry-Fit muscle shirt for male athletes black size XL"

Always think about what people are actually searching for that your service or product would be able to fix or provide.

Hope this adds some value to this great post from James :)

i am very interesting in your articls your article is very good and on reality base

Loved reading this interesting article. Useful SEO guide for founders both in the pre-validation phase as well as the post-validation stage.

Useful article, thanks! Everything is said correctly.

@IndieJames this is.. a gold mine ! Thank you :)

Another terrific post of @IndieJames! Totally agree with @FakeScouts, can't say it any better: it is the best SEO summary, especially for newbies. It covers everything a newbie needs to know:-) Thank you James!

If you're an indie hacker, chances are you're not getting much ROI from SEO.

Learn why and what you can do instead.

Valuable article. Thought-provoking. Lots of insight. Thanks for sharing a valuable, thought-provoking, and insightful article.

I agree with this 100% here's why:

• If you're going to build something for at least a year because you have see signs of PMF, you need to start thinking about SEO early on because you will see benefits towards the end of your period:

now this doesn't mean you have to start hunting for backlinks but there are some very "cheap" SEO on-page tactics that you should ALWAYS respect.

• Not putting SEO in your tactical pocket means that if you keep working on your product and you're getting traction from customers/word of mouth/direct sales....you're going to regret it!

however like the author James says, if you have just barely started and are still looking for a minimal sign of PMF then you might use your LIMITED resources wisely elsewhere!

I fear that most people WASTE their time doing this: I truly believe the biggest problem is that people validate a problem for WAY too much time and not LEANly enough, then realize that they don't have anything.

They end up SAD with a domain name, 5 newsletters signups, 15 twitter followers and a $200 Webflow bill.

Nice - thought provoking! Like many I had just come to assume that its a necessity without questioning. How do you see content marketing in this (orig high quality domain relevent stuff, not regurgitated fodder) as to my mind that is kinda SEO and kinda not. Should you put some focus on this early on or leave it until first 💵's ?

Great post! As an indie hacker you can quickly check your sites SEO via www.serpmaze.com . It will give recommendations on what you should optimize

Hey great post!

I really think you nailed down the broad strokes approach without getting too far into the nuance of SEO.

I wanted to add my two cents for what its worth, I head up the Search/SEO division at my agency and have seen the pitfalls of companies and individuals invest in SEO too early.

Talking to the early stage start ups or people bootstrapping; the only single thing you need once your website is live is to make sure that you rank first for your brand name. Every other marketing channel is better than SEO 90% of the time if you can achieve this.

This solves a few issues:

1. If you rank for your brand name your technical SEO is usually good enough, the foundations are there to build on this later
2. People won't find you early through generic search terms, you're not yet a major player in your category so why should you rank for broad terms. Build the brand/product first
3. Eliminate an option. SEO is a shiny object and your time/money/energy is better served on other growth channels. Know that if you rank for your brand, people can find you.

Great post, I see too many fall for this trap early on and it's hard to watch. I hope some people take your advice and it steers them on the right path

I have been debating whether or not to start adding blog post content for the product I am building. Haven't launched yet. And this was super helpful.

SEO is one of most beneficial marketing way . Its hard but if you are on right track . It will give you high boost.

First thing I read being on this site, I'm flabbergasted at the amount of value I just got, thank you :)

I think this approach is bang on.

Until a product is validated, has some degree of product-market fit, investing heavily in SEO is a bad idea.

Also, before you get to SEO, you're much better focusing on activities that will generate word of mouth and inbound links, such as thought leadership, more viral / shareable content, and maybe some limited PR.

Once your have some kind of baseline domain authority and confidence in you product, then you're ready to invest in SEO.

Context: I do content marketing at PostHog. We only started investing in SEO seriously since I joined in Jan – a good year or so after the business started. Before I joined, the founders had invested some time into outreach and viral content, getting stuff on Hacker News etc., which made my job growing organic SEO so much easier.

When the context is SEO. My perception:

1. Take care of technical and on-page SEO.

2. SEO is a game of time and quality. If anyone continuously gives quality content for a long time. If possible to get a good rank on search engines.

3. There are more than 200 factors on Google to get a rank on the first page(According to expert opinions, Google does not publish SEO factors officially ).

4. Make content for humans, not for search engines. Great content automatically covers search engine factors.

5. There are many spammers and spam agencies in the SEO industry. Be careful about these. Don't lose your money, time, and brand reputation.

Valuable article, with some great SEO resources!

I think the use of (early) SEO strategy as an indie maker greatly depends on what sort of product you are creating and most importantly how comfortable you are, as an individual, with all the various ways of promoting your product. Engineering-as-marketing can be a great way for Technical Founders to generate valuable traffic and potential customers at a low cost, and it happens to mostly rely on backlinks and SEO.

Thanks for the insights. Do you think all off-page SEO needs to be organic, IE your own blog? Or should you be trying to get blog posts put elsewhere?

Very well said. My product is in the validation stage and I will only be spending money on SEO when I get some paying users.

Should one work on SEO if product is launched in semi-saturated or saturated market? In case of semi-saturated or saturated market you already know that there is a need for your software/tool in market. So in that scenario can we skip PMF step?? Any thoughts?

Such a great post. SEO is important, but it's definitely not a must and really depends factors like your passion for writing, industry content standards etc...

Great post @IndieJames. Nice to get some thoughts from other indie hackers.

I come from an SEO background and have been doing SEO for 7 years, so I am biased. However, I strongly believe that even if SEO isn't your main channel and you don't intend on it being your main channel, you should cover all of the SEO best practices from the get go as they're the stepping stones to just having a solid website for your guests/users.

When a business is in its earliest stages, having a speedy, secure and easy to use website is going to make it much easier to acquire new users.

Adding a sneaky plug here, as again I am biased, my business "Validation Run" (https://validation.run) helps with the validation stage of any business, product or campaign by measuring the activity of real people as they search and evaluate your proposed ideas. Along the way we're able to identify the best performing channel for you in the process.

Validating your idea before/without doing SEO might work for some ideas (SaaS, services, etc.) and might not work for others (Job boards, blogs, content driven) which heavily depend on traffic.

Excellent post. I specialize in the business of expertise because I think it's a great low-risk stepping stone.

In that neck of the woods I'd even go so far as to say, don't worry about SEO at all.

Do a little bit so the people that wanna find you can find you. But that's it.

The reason why is that you don't want to be one of the options of the consideration set in an environment of perfect competition. [1]

What you want is unfairness and being in a situation where there is no competition. I.e. your brand equity (the premium people pay for your brand over the generic alternative. this is not the formal definition obviously.) should be through the roof.

So the situation you really should be in is not potential customers googling "positioning for indie hackers" but your name / product / service.

NOTES

[1] Perfect competition occurs when all available options in the consideration set are interchangeable according to the perception of the consumer, thus choices mostly get determined by price. As a result, profits get competed away until they reach a stable Nash equilibrium. This is why mainstream economists (and marxists) love them so much. 1. They're easy to model. and 2. You end up with a consumer surplus situation which means the willingness to pay (how much a consumer would pay) is higher than the actual price.)

This seems interesting, thanks for sharing!

SEO is a waste of time - most indie hackers don't need it to succeed.

Absolutely amazing post and I have to say I agree with a lot of it even though I own a SEO startup. I just think that SEO shouldn't be the main focus which is why I started my startup in the first place. We just created an AI called QwickSEO that automates everything so people can focus on other things.

This is a new perspective. Thanks for sharing

Is there any startup want to test your MVP?
Let me do it for free. How can I help you?

• Test your MVP
• Give you the feedback
• Give you the list of bugs
  Reach me out: https://startupvalidation.web.app

But for new SaaS or websites, SEO may be an excellent choice to grow them. So many people will search for keywords to find something they need.

what do you think about using tik tok or other forms of marketing?

I agree, seems to be like the future is: short video viral content + websites + community.

Though, TikTok is investing in SEO, so it'd be nice to instead of investing in SEO for your website, best to do it through TikTok!

Agree with the exception of you should make sure your technicals are 100%. Wasted time and money on SEO for competitive KWs. Wish I didnt focus on SEO as a strategy, but... I am happy how well my site performs when I do add new content.

Thanks for this write up! It was a helpful summary for an SEO noob like myself and I appreciate the point of view on when to invest in it.

@IndieJames, I appreciate the shoutout!

BTW, I moved Growth Memo to a new address: kevin-indig.com

Totally disagree. SEO needs to start as soon as you have a domain. It takes a few months to start working, yes... but if you don't start now, you won't have the traffic when you need it.

SEO is one of the most powerful weapon if any person know how to use it. http://axolotlsquishmallow.com