How to Scale Organic Traffic 5× and Grow MRR +65% in an AI SaaS – Lessons from a Real 5-Month SEO Push

On April ‘25, we took over the SEO of TubeOnAi- AI Content Summarizer App. It was bootstrapped and doing somewhat 2k MRR with over 45k lifetime users. They just came out of a successful LTD campaign on SaaSZilla, and was ready to cement its base for organic, inbound growth.

They had a somewhat working model going on in SEO, with 35 DR and 500+ traffic as per Ahrefs. So, we decided to take that over first, and turn SEO into their #1 revenue generator channel.

The challenge was, in this niche, most of the traffic won't be quality for MQL or SQL. So, we had to pinpoint the pages who drive quality signups, scale up those classes of contents, and do on-page and links to put them on top of search results.

The Plan

TubeOnAi had 250+ pages indexed on google, scoring 6k clicks/mo. Among them, there were 80+ pages which were either landing pages, free tools, and BoFu blogposts(competitors, alternatives, etc) which hold the potential to drive high-intent traffic that can enter the funnel.

The initial plan was to-

Track the top pages that’s responsible for driving paid users.
Multiplying content that works
Link push to climb up the SERP

Part 1- Tracking SEO Pages That’s Drives Paid Signups

We started with a funnel dashboard and a feature usage dashboard in MixPanel. Studying the actions, we created a tracking plan to implement on the backend, which will tell us-

Which pages are driving how much signups(CTA)
How much of those signups are completed
The feature usage of those users
How many of them are hitting the free tier limit
How many of them are subscribing to the paid plan

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This gave us a total of 36 out of 250 pages that checked out all the boxes. The types of pages are-

Free tool pages (google drive summarizer, youtube to pdf summarizer, etc)
Feature and use case-based landing pages (content repurposing software, ai text summarizer, etc)
‘Alternative to’ and ‘best apps’ listicle blogposts

Part 2- Multiplying Contents That Work

The groups of pages from the previous step helped us identify more landing page or lead magnets or blogpost ideas that align with the product’s USPs and hit the pain points of the ICP.

We then picked up ‘seed words’ and juggled through the keywords to prepare a content calendar for the next 3 months.

Example-

From ‘Youtube to pdf summarizer’ to ‘X to Y summarizer’
From ‘AI text summarizer’ to ‘AI X summarizer’
From ‘best productivity apps for students’ to ‘best productivity apps for XYZ’

Example-

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Part 3- Link push to climb up the SERP

Here comes the most critical part of the project- link building with a tie to ROI. Which means, every link we build, has to be connected to a potential climb up the DAU/MRR graph.

First of all, we could have built links left right and center and inflate the DR. And maybe, traffic would have increased too.

But our goal was to only push ranks of the pages that bring quality signups, and there were just 36 of them.

So we set some ground rules for link building-

60% of the link budget will be spent on improving the ranks of the ‘shortlisted’ pages.
40% is split across brand mentions.
Anchor texts will be partial matches of the keywords that we didn’t rank for higher KD.
Relevance wise, we’ll follow Site>Page>Section order

Over a course of 5 months, we outreached to 12k+ websites, and over 160 positive responses came in. While shortlisting and negotiating, the metric requirement we set was-

DR 30+, Traffic 1k+
Traffic majority- US
No DR or traffic inflation, ho history of hard algorithmic penalty
Even traffic distribution, means top 10 pages don’t get over 60% of the total traffic.
Linked domain < Referring Domain
Links can be inserted in articles with a high-to-moderate organic traffic.

Eventually built 56 good backlinks in 5 months. Most of it was to improve the performance of the ‘winning’ old pages. But meanwhile some of those ‘new’ contents also started hitting the 2nd page. So some links went on those as well.

The Result

We saw a significant increase in ranking and traffic, particularly for the older ‘winning’ pages. They started ranking for higher KD keywords, and traffic kept increasing in pages inter-linked to those pages as well.

Example, here’s the links built for page YouTube Video Summarizer - http://tubeonai.com/youtube-video-summarizer/ followed by the traffic change-

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Overall, these are the top linked pages throughout the period-

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And here is a glimpse of the links that’ve been built over the time-
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The TLDR of the results-

GSC says the clicks went from 6k/mo to 31k/mo
DR went from 35 to 48
Page 1 ranking went from 72 to 568
DAU went from 175/day to 375/day
MRR spiked from $2k/mo to $3.3k/mo

TubeOnAi Search Console Data(L12M)

TubeOnAi Ahrefs Ranking Data (L12M)