SEO strategy to rank #1 in 6 months

First post: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KwG_8HCdpEVnvtP5pL6

Initial launch day was good (not great), but it's a nice starting step for our SEO strategy (elaborated below).

• 900 unique visits to the page
• 8 lengthy conversations
• 5 SaaS signups :)

In my last post I didn't get a chance to elucidate the steps we're taking to build up quality backlinks so here it is in more detail. Relative timeline is about 90 days. Note: I'm not sure of the value of steps 0 and 1, I belive it's mostly a psychological benefit after weeks of working on a project.

1. Public Launch (easy)

2. Micro Brand (medium)

3. Direct Outreach (medium)

4. Press (hard)

5. Directories (easy)

6. Existing Resources (medium)

7. Long tail (hard)
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8. Public Launch - This is the easy one that anyone can do. Post it on your personal FB, Twitter. Email all your friends in the industry. If you've been telling people about your project along the way, they'll be excited to hear that it's live and most likely tell their friends. In addition, this phase includes the typical HackerNews and ProductHunt launch which typically don't have meaningful impact on SEO unless you do really well and other websites pick up your launch. In our case we got about 300 uniques from DesignerNews and an immaterial amount from HN and PH.

9. Micro Brand - If you're a niche product, this is where you really make a mark. Because we're an architecture resource, we are able to reach out to communities on fb, linkedin, quora, and reddit to build a bit of a brand within our industry. Luckily we've been around as a Saas company for over a year so we have a small reputation already.

10. Direct Outreach - Because our page is a curated list this isn't always relevant. But we're creating a collection of software products so we are able to email or tweet at the companies we featured on our page and hope to get a social share, a newsletter shoutout or ideally a link somewhere on their site. This is pretty time consuming, but if the companies are established, those backlinks are gold.

11. Press - News sites—especially in niches—tend to have really high Domain Authority, meaning their links are worth a lot more than most links. We've been lucky enough to have some reposts and articles written about our work by a few industry leading publications so we have those editor email addresses in our contact list. But even with our connections, publishers are incredibly finicky. We've had just as much luck with cold outreach as we have with warm leads. If you have an interesting story, that's the key to catching a publication's eye. In our case we know technology is an up and coming topic, so the plan is to say we offer the best resource for finding software for your office.

12. Directories - This is the secret sauce to our SEO strategy. The thing is directories are ironically difficult to find. Once you have a website reach a critical mass, the backlinks are revealed to you. Becuse of the success of Color Codes we have a spreadsheet with hundreds of high quality backlink sites that we're able to submit to. Enough with the teasing, but some great places to start are Awwwards, CSS Design Awards, etc. Award sites (even if you don't win) have really high Domain Authority AND have large audiences.

13. Existing Resources - Again another unfair advantage (sorry about that). But because we have websites that rank well in Google, we can leverage their ranking to boost ours. The tentative plan is to write (or hire out) a few 500-word articles with our specific keywords and post them on our best ranking sites. We also have access to mit.edu web addresses ("benefits" of 6 digit student loans), which we'll be adding articles to also.

14. Long Tail - These steps all lead to the final, most painful, but most valuable step. Building backlinks the old school way, with door-to-door knocking. You'll need to install Webmaster tools to get a sense for how your website is ranking, but in the end you'll have to directly outreach to websites that rank high for you relevant market. Right now our ratio is 1:40 backlinks to emails sent.

So this is the plan for ranking our new page for the keyword "architecture software" and "best architecture software", hopefully #1 in google by March 2018. Seeing as it's day one of this journey, we've got a long way to go.