How I grew my SaaS business to $40K MRR with SEO

I built my SaaS business - StandOut CV, an online CV/resume builder - to £40K monthly recurring revenue using SEO as the only traffic source.

So far it’s attracted 18 million visitors and 23,000 paying customers, without outside funding and with a tiny team (just me at first, now two employees and a part-time agency)

But I didn’t start with an audience or marketing experience. Just a new domain and a lot to learn.

Here’s the short version of how I did it.

I got burned by a cheap SEO freelancer

When I started, I had a hunch SEO could drive long-term traffic

But I knew nothing about it. My background was recruitment, not marketing.

So I wrote a few CV advice posts myself. They weren’t brilliant, but they were better than much of what was out there.

Then I made my first big mistake: I hired a “bargain” SEO freelancer on Fiverr, who charged £200 for 10 backlinks, which sounded perfect a the time.

But when the link report came back, I was horrified. Every link came from shady, irrelevant sites. It was clear this approach would do more harm than good.

So I decided to stop outsourcing blindly and learn SEO myself.

I learnt that only 2 things really matter in SEO

SEO is a huge and overwhelming subject. I devoured hundreds of “ultimate guides”, blogs, YouTube videos then tested everything on my own site.

Eventually I realised two things matter more than anything else:

1. Content - Creating helpful pages worth ranking.
2. Backlinks — Getting trusted sites linking to you.

Technical SEO matters too, but it won’t move the needle alone.

You can perfect your site speed and meta tags, but if you only have one article, search engines have nothing to rank.

On the other hand, a site with 50 solid articles and a few good backlinks can still generate, even if its technical setup isn’t perfect.

For new sites, the first priority should always be creating quality content, then building relevant links.

I built a content production machine

Today StandOut CV has 1,000+ articles driving thousands of daily visitors with minimal upkeep.

But it took time to scale.

At first I wrote everything myself, but I slowly built a small team and process to do the heavy lifting.

Here’s how I did it:

• Hired freelance writers: but vetted carefully. Clear job descriptions, test pieces, and paying fairly kept great writers long-term.

• Created writer guides: Detailed style and tone docs so writers could match my voice and expertise.

• Gave thorough briefs: Every article had structure, headings, length and angle defined before writing started.

• Hired an editor: To upload, format, and finalise content in WordPress so I wasn’t buried in admin.

• Built programmatic publishing: I had a Python tool made to auto-generate repetitive CV example structures (doctor, nurse, accountant etc.), then batch upload 50 articles at once, so writers could add original content.

• Used AI sparingly: ChatGPT helps brainstorm and outline, but final articles come from real experience.

This system lets us scale content output massively while keeping quality high.

StandOut CV currently has over 1,000 articles on it.

Building this huge content library took a lot of time and work, but it now attracts thousands of potential customers every day with minimal maintenance.

I prioritised quality link building over quantity

Link building is an essential part of SEO, but it’s often the most misunderstood.

It’s not a case of building as many links as possible and you’ll win.

Google sees links as votes of trust for your website, and where those votes come from is far more important than how many there are.

A thousand mentions from low-quality, unknown sites might look impressive in your SEO reports, but they carry little weight in reality. A single endorsement from TechCrunch or a leading voice in your industry is far more powerful.

I learnt this early on, and it allowed me to outrank competitors who had thousands more links than me.

These are my main tactics for building quality links that make an impac:

Guest Posting (in the early stages)

In the early days, with no reputation or domain authority, I had to hustle for my first backlinks.

I researched small job sites and career blogs, then pitched them CV advice articles, offering useful content in exchange for a link back. It was slow going and I got lots of rejections, but over time I built a small network of guest posting partners and a steady trickle of relevant links.

That early credibility opened doors and I eventually landed contributor slots with bigger sites like CV Library, Fast Company, Forbes and The Guardian. Those links (combined with the growing content on my site) pushed organic traffic into the thousands per month and gave me enough revenue to quit my job and focus on StandOut CV full time.

But guest posting isn’t easy to scale, and it’s less effective now as mass, templated outreach from cheap SEO agencies has made websites reluctant to accept guest articles.

So I now focus on the following 2 link building methods:

Linkable assets

Linkable assets are by far the most effective way of building high quality links at scale.

They are essentially pieces of content that are so useful, that people link to them naturally.

It might sound too good to be true, but there are 2 main types we find successful:

• Data reports and studies: We produce one-page collations of data, stats and facts for a particular topic - that journalists and other writers find extremely helpful when writing articles on the subject.
  When they include one of our stats in their article, they link back to our page as a source, providing a constant flow of high quality links, with some coming from major publications. Here is a case study on a linkable asset I created on remote working statistics which has generated over 700 backlinks with no outreach.

• Free tools - Tools like tax calculators, budgeting spreadsheets and resume templates are extremely useful for users and attract plenty of links from bloggers when done correctly. We published a simple job application tracker spreadsheet about 7 years ago, and it still pulls in links today.

The beauty of linkable assets is that most businesses can create them in-house for a relatively low cost, and they can attract amazingly high quality backlinks for years.

Digital PR

Digital PR is about creating newsworthy stories that earn coverage and backlinks from major publications. You turn data from your industry into headlines, and then distribute your stories to the press.

For example, at StandOut CV we ran a survey on how many people lie on their resume, uncovering surprising stats about job seekers’ honesty. That single piece was featured on high-authority sites like Forbes, Yahoo News and The Independent, earning powerful backlinks and huge exposure for the business.

We converted customers

Attracting visitors is great but it's only one part of the puzzle - the end goal is to convert them into customers.

We achieved this by placing strong tailored CTAs across all of our content, encouraging a large percentage of visitors to try out the CV builder.

The app lets people build a complete CV/resume for free and only requests payment to download the document. This allows customers to trial every element of the app before committing to a purchase - ensuring that they are 100% happy with product.

What’s next?

StandOut CV runs lean with a small team and steady SEO traffic. Now I’ve launched LinkQuest, an SEO agency helping SaaS and tech companies replicate this growth.

Here are a couple of resources if you’re starting your own SEO journey:

• Free SaaS SEO checklist: Interactive spreadsheet to guide your progress

• Ultimate guide to SaaS SEO: everything I wish I’d known when I started.

Always happy to talk SEO, so feel free to get in touch

Good luck building your traffic!