How I took this website from 30+ rank on Google Search to top 10

Hey Fellow Hackers,

It all started when I was at the airport waiting for my partner, and she shared a link to track the flight. It was extremely difficult to figure my way around. I even checked the traffic of the app on SimilarWeb because it was the top search result. To my surprise, it had millions of visitors monthly.

Turns out, it was an app overcomplicated and made for aviation geeks. But what about travelers like me who want to check the data in 5 seconds and just move on? That’s when I decided I wanted to fix this.

I called my designer friend, and we cooked up some cool, modern designs. After two weeks of development and gathering public data about airports, airlines, logos, etc., we launched WhereFlight. The only aim was to cater to non-geeks — helping them easily track their flights through a simple user interface.

Initially, we didn’t know what to do with the project, but I started off by tracking it on Google Search Console. We didn’t receive a lot of search impressions in the first few weeks. Then I decided to submit a sitemap with new pages every day. I manually compiled hundreds of flight codes in the sitemap everyday. We started posting high quality blogs on our subdomain, started getting more backlinks(some by paying a little others via reaching out), changing our product tagline/page titles to something more catchy(AI-Powered flight tracker), making some key features not present on our competitors website(like Rating airline performance, delay charts showing last 10 days delay/on-time stats), started posting everywhere about how easy it is to use our website, launched on product hunt which gave us a lot of visibility, launched on LaunchIgnitor. Surprisingly, with a few quality backlinks other websites started to give backlinks automatically. I mean after Product Hunt's success we saw various websites automatically listing us from nowhere. As of now we crossed 400+ backlinks(Earlier it was 20-30 and that too from random backlink providing websites).

We realized on thing that if you have to come on top start providing what no one is providing i.e unique features. We launched one more product this week which is a simple timezone converter app, UI is very appealing then others and we added a time slider(again diff from others) and we are already seeing clicks from this.

In some time(like a month or two), Google started to catch up. We began seeing an uptrend. Cut to today — we’re ranking in the top 10 on search!

We’re just getting started, and I’ll be sharing everything we learn as we keep building WhereFlight — from SEO experiments to new travel tools for users.

👉 WhereFlight: https://whereflight.com/
👉 PH: https://www.producthunt.com/products/whereflight?launch=whereflight