How I used SEO to avoid marketing

I have been building small tools, content websites and doing programmatic SEO for the past 9 years and I never do any marketing for my projects

It is possible to write content, do technical SEO, and see the traffic start flowing in. Here's a sample project report from 2019.

So if you are building a tool / SaaS / content project and you hate marketing, but you want to get some organic traffic, here is what you need to do:

1. Choose your keywords wisely, do some research beforehand - even as simple a using google + google trends to pick-up the good keywords
2. Don't use an SPA framework (single-page app) like React alone (Next.js supports SSG / SSR so it works) - SPA are the worst for ranking, Google is having a hard time with large JS bundle and dynamic content that is no pre-rendered. Any modern SSG / SSR framework is OK (Next.js, Nuxt) or any SSR back-end framework that use templating (Django, Rails, Laravel)
3. Make sure your meta tags are OK (Title, h1 ect..) - respecting the basics HTML semantics is important, each page must have a h1 tag at least
4. Generate a sitemap - Yeah that sounds old-school but It's still the best in town for indexing pages
5. Submit the domain + sitemap in GSC (Google Search Console)
6. Use Google's web.dev service (especially the /measure page) to check if your website / webapp follows best practises for SEO, perf, and accessibility
7. Use HTTPS

...and you're set - if your niche / keywords is not in very high competition niche, you'll progressively get traffic after 6 to 12 months - that is, if you don't get backlinks or do marketing - but that's the point of my post 😄

You can accelerate that process by doing marketing, but trust me it's optional in order to get some organic traffic

My post popular paid tool get 5k visitors / day - 100% organic - I never paid 1€ for marketing, but it's been around since 2016 and organic traffic has been raising slowly and steadily for the past years

As this process takes a lot of time, I launch a ton of websites each month (This is what I call "planting seeds") because some will never get enough organic traffic to be viable over years

My latest experiments:

• nocodeguru.co - an index of no-code and low-code tools, that I aim to make the perfect no-code suggestion tool
• playtoearn.one - a user-generated content website for discovering Play-to-earn games
• address-generator.com - a tiny tool to generate random blockchain addresses for developers
• marketcapvsmarketcap.com - a crypto market capitalization comparator tool
• touslescashbacks.com - a cashback search engine for the French market

That's all folks!

if you have any question, don't hesitate to reach out here or on Twitter