How I've scaled content production as an indie hacker

This is a guest post by Flavio, an indie hacker with a pretty cool Twitter (X) username :) Here's the post:

Doing SEO is a gigantic task to add on top of all the things Indie Hackers do.

So what do most creators do?

Create thoughtless content without even considering a scalable Content Strategy.

But don’t worry, I'll guide you through a strategy that, once mastered, will become second nature—the one I’ve been using successfully for 16 years.

This strategy includes:

• Planning your content with a technique called “Semantic SEO”.
• Creating the Perfect SEO Content Brief
• Scaling your Content with Content Briefs

I’ve applied these techniques to get some exciting results:

• 8 Million Organics / Year To My Travel Guides, creating a 6-Fig Profit Business
• Get a client from 120 to 120K clicks a month in 7 months
• Double The Traffic of a Client after a complicated redesign and migration

Again, all of this has been possible because I’ve been using the following concepts:

• Semantic SEO
• Pillar Pages
• Content Clusters
• Content Briefs

These are a few powerful concepts that most people don’t know.

They might seem complicated to grasp initially, but bear with me, as I tell you how this works.

Semantic SEO

If you’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, you are probably aware of all the context you need to input into it for better results. Google is no different, as it works as a Large Language Model (LLM).

The big difference is that your input can take hours to days to show up on Google, instead of seconds with ChatGPT. Put a score for quality context on top of that, and then you know where I’m coming from.

The more semantic context you can give to Google, the better the relationships it can make between your concepts, and the better you’ll rank: links, semantically related terms, disambiguation, etc. They all play a role in how you’ll rank with your project.

Pillar Pages

You know when you open a book, and the author gives you detailed information about what you’ll read in the coming pages? Well, that is a Pillar Page.

It’s a piece of information that will hint at all the “chapters” inside the “book”, in this case, the website.

Content Clusters

Have you ever tried using the expression “Sightseeing” + “Destination”?

Look what you get when searching for “Sightseeing Chicago”:

What does it mean?

If you were to create a “Sightseeing Chicago” page, it should include the most essential sights/landmarks and places to visit in the city.

Following the example of the travel guides, check what I do at porto.travel – my Porto Travel Guide for the neighborhoods section.

It’s a page with brief information about each neighborhood, so that the reader can visit the pages of the most important neighborhoods of Porto.

They are all linked together, linking back to the Pillar Page and between them.

Porto Neighborhoods (PIllar Page)

• Aliados (cluster)
• Bolhão (cluster)
• Ribeira (cluster)

This is how it would look like in an organigram, with each arrow representing internal links:

And this is how it looks like in reality:

A critical nuance I need to add:

• Clusters are not always related to URL structure (e.g. /pillar-page/cluster/content)
• Content Cluster can just be related to connections and internal links (e.g. Page A points to B,C,D,E)

Content Briefs

After you’ve done the groundwork and created the initial structure for your website, you’ll also want to take work off your shoulders.

And there’s nothing better than a Content Brief for that.

Now, let me tell you my Indie Hacker story.

I have about 25 travel guides. These travel guides come from combining my love for travel and side hustling. They were 100% intended to generate some passive income (and they do).

This is all well-written and curated content I’ve written over the years after walking these cities.

They started to rank well and generated some money, but I couldn’t multiply myself and live everywhere all the time. So the natural path was to start delegating.

When I delegated my first travel guide, it was a disaster of epic proportions. Thousands paid, 12 months went by, and nothing happened.

If you leave writers off the hook, they’ll write whatever they please without much worry about SEO.

So I took another stab at it, but this time, I planned the content by category and then set rules for each page to rank them in Google: the content brief.

For the most part, my travel guides still rank without my input, which shows how you can go a long way in creating SEO-proof content with the proper SEO techniques.

Scaling Content Creation with Content Briefs

After a few years, I started doing this for clients, and the occasional SEO planning became a daily thing, which became a chore.

One day I woke up and had dozens of briefs to do, writers waiting for my input, SEO managers without instructions, and fires everywhere. I was freaking out.

So, once again, I put my head down to solve the problem.

I created an SOP to build Content Briefs by piecing different software (and then built SwiftBrief.com to solve it in 2 clicks).

This is the Content Brief it generates. It gives you a glance at how the SEO landscape looks like for a given topic, how and what to write, and it even tells you what you should link internally:

• Who are the main competitors in the first 10 search results
• How many words is the average of the top 10 posts (some consider that statistically relevant)
• What keywords variations can you use in the writing
• What related terms and topics can be created to support the content
• What are the FAQ form people searching for your topic on Google (this is called “People Also Ask” feature

An SEO Content Brief also gives the writer more information about how to write the post, for example:

• Search Intent
• Content Angle
• Internal Links to use
• Meta Title
• Title (H1)
• Other Headings (H2, H3, etc.)
• Format (listicle, guide, comparison, etc.)

It’s a lot of work, but it can be solved with some tools nowadays.

Most of the software to publish content is out-of-the-box and ready to comply with the SEO technical standards.

You just needed the strategy, and I already handed it to you.

Now you just need to pull up your sleeves.

Here’s the plan for you:

2. Plan your Semantic SEO Strategy
   a) Think well about your users, and their different intentions
   b) Brainstorm different types of content your potential user looks for
   c) Create ideas for your Pillar Pages and Content Clusters

3. Set up a spreadsheet that can help you identify quickly:
   a) The right Pillar Pages
   b) With as many Content Clusters as you think it’s possible

4. Create an Editorial Calendar to publish these articles
   a) Start writing (or delegating the writing) with the proper Content Brief using swiftbrief.com to save time

5. Publish in your favorite CMS
   a) Make sure everything is well interlinked
   b) Track changes you did and new additions
   c) Follow up every week with optimizations you could be doing

Should you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at Twitter: @fba