How can SEO help you build a $30k/month Micro SAAS?
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the tactics used to optimize your website pages to reach and maintain a high ranking on search engines for particular keywords. For example, if someone searches “Landing page for business” and your AI Landing page builder appears at the top of the results, you’ve really mastered SEO!
SEO has been a traditional marketing channel for two decades and, like influencer marketing, is often perceived as a marketing tactic only to be used by large organizations. However, what if I told you that SEO can give you really good results (in a month) and excellent results (in 3 months) to take your micro SaaS to $30,000/month?
There are two ways Indie Hackers / Solopreneurs utilize SEO:
- The first is SEO as a micro saas tool itself which Pat Walls shares a lot about in his case studies
- The second is SEO contributing to your growth of micro saas
Finding SEO Opportunities to build your next Micro SaaS (Worth 100K min traffic)
In this approach typically an indie hacker reverse engineers the internet, and finds opportunities that have high keyword volume and yet is untapped on the internet.
Carrd.co, a simple one-page website builder, found success in a crowded market by focusing on simplicity. Their growth to $30,000 monthly revenue in just two years serves as an inspiring example for aspiring SaaS entrepreneurs.
Carrd’s success can be attributed to their strategic approach:
1. They identified a high-value opportunity by targeting search volumes for “simple website builder” and “one-page website,” which combined for 22,000 monthly searches.
2. In response, they developed an extremely user-friendly, focused tool specifically for creating one-page websites.
3. This targeted approach resulted in significant growth, largely driven by organic search traffic.
To replicate this success and find your own SEO opportunities, consider the following strategies:
1. Look for “simple,” “easy,” or “quick” variants of existing SaaS tool searches. These often indicate user pain points and potential market gaps.
2. Use tools like Ahrefs to discover keywords that combine your niche with terms such as “alternative,” “for [specific user],” or “without [common pain point].”
3. Validate demand by creating a basic landing page and running limited Google Ads campaigns before fully committing to development.
4. Focus on long-tail keywords for a single-use case of a broader parent topic. This allows you to target a specific audience with less competition.
5. Create comparison pages between your tool and well-known alternatives, optimizing for “[competitor] alternative” searches to capture users looking for options.
Use SEO for your Micro SaaS (To grow from 1K $ / Mo to 30K$ /Mo )
On average, it takes 1–3 months of SEO efforts to start showing results. SEO is a game of analytics + patience, I will not recommend putting a single dime in SEO efforts until unless the problem is validated ( you already have a paid user! )
So after say certain revenue (1K $ revenue) , you decide to work on SEO
How would you go about this? What does your day 1 look like?
Before we go ahead here is an underrated piece 👇
Which talks about “When is the right time to start focusing on SEO?”
So now you have decided to go for an SEO strategy, here’s how your week looks like
Week 1⇒
👉 Start with listing your product on the tools and startup directory here
👉 Start with some basic blogs about the central core keyword ( for ex an AI Image tool write blogs about “AI images”
Pro Tip :- Out of your 10 blogs , only 1 or 2 can start giving ROI in 3 weeks
Week 2 ⇒
👉 Try to find some powerful keywords, focus on finding keywords with (KD ❤0, Vol 5k+, Informative funnel)
👉 Start creating more content and list around social media list that also helps you in backlinking.
Week 3–4 ⇒
👉 Ship 3 blogs weekly, mostly on long-tail keywords
👉 Time to unlock the holy grail of free tools ( like ai baby face generator/ ai avatar generator) , find some free tool here
Pro Tip — Build free tools with this open source product
Week (5–12)⇒
👉 Aggressively reach out for backlinks ( Don’t buy one until absolutely sure , try to build collaboration with other backlinks)
👉 Update blogs with keywords, add external references and internal references
Pro Tip — Use these Prompts in your daily SEO activities
Bonus
Make sure to include these Indie-friendly technical SEO practices while implementing it
- Use Cloudflare’s free plan to implement basic edge SEO techniques.
- Leverage static site generators like Gatsby or Next.js for blazing-fast load times.
- Implement structured data to enhance your search results’ appearance.
- Use free tools like Screaming Frog (limited version) to perform regular technical SEO audits.
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