How We Achieved a 100x Increase in Search Traffic in Three Months

Since 2021, I have started a business with my partner. Initially, we decided to develop a no-code data processing tool called QuickTable(https://quicktable.io). After about half a year of development, we released the first version of QuickTable in May 2022. I tried different ways to get traffic for QuickTable.

Although we tried our best to make QuickTable easy to use, I found onboarding a user is still a big problem. After tried a couple of months, we decided to do a pivot. We built some small data applications that can process CSV and Excel files by just uploading and clicking.

Because these are tools targeted at specific data processing scenarios, we hope to try using SEO to gain organic traffic from search engines and see if it is feasible.

After about three months, we grew from 7 clicks per day on our website on January 24 to 1,052 clicks per day on April 18. In three months, we achieved about 100 times growth.

How did we achieve it?
You may wonder how we did it? The answer is programmatic SEO.

So what is programmatic SEO? Programmatic SEO is a method of generating a large number of landing pages to meet the search needs of the Internet and gain organic traffic. It is a very useful customer acquisition method in the field of content marketing. Well-known companies such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, Zillow, etc. have adopted programmatic SEO methods extensively.

For startups in the SaaS or PaaS field like us, we can also find companies that are proficient in using programmatic SEO, such as HubSpot, Zapier, etc.

Some people may ask, what is the difference between programmatic SEO and content farms? Will Google penalize companies that do programmatic SEO?

So what is the difference between programmatic SEO and content farms?

In general, when a company does programmatic SEO, its core goal is to match its products with the search intentions of end users. Companies will usually find search keywords based on their products in different user scenarios. These search keywords are often very long-tail search keywords. The company then generates content based on the search keywords to show how their products can be used in relevant search scenarios, so that users can find their products when searching, ultimately achieving subsequent user conversion. The ultimate goal is for the website to provide valuable services to users. Therefore, whether it is TripAdvisor for To C or Zapier for To B, the ultimate goal is to serve online business users.

Content farms, on the other hand, find a large number of long-tail search keywords and use tools to generate a large amount of content based on these search keywords. They are a bit like low-quality encyclopedia websites, but their core goal is to increase website traffic for advertising or selling links. These types of websites generally do not value user experience and have no real service, so they may ultimately be penalized by search engines.

So how did we do programmatic SEO?

Since programmatic SEO can enable an online service website to obtain traffic from search engines through users’ search intent keywords, how do we do programmatic SEO?

Keyword research is a very important part of programmatic SEO. We need to put our products into the scenarios where users use them, and think from the user’s perspective what problems they may encounter and what problems they may search for. For example, when we do programmatic SEO for data processing tools, we will consider what problems ordinary users can solve with our tools. We think that users may want to delete blank rows when processing Excel files, or split a large CSV file into multiple small files. So we use Keyword Planner to research these words, and then find that these words have considerable search volume, but the competition is not very high. Therefore, these can be used as keywords for our programmatic SEO. Ultimately, programmatic SEO is from the user’s perspective, to confirm which problems can help users solve. Looking back at when I first started writing content, I was always writing articles around some concepts, which was completely from my own product perspective. But for a product without influence, your concepts are nothing to users. As the flywheel of programmatic SEO starts spinning, your thinking will open up. You can view related search keywords through Google Search Console and further expand your search keywords.

The core of SEO is to meet users’ search needs through content. After determining the search keywords, we need to create content around the keywords. At one time, this work was either done by myself or costing tens of dollars to ask Fiverr for help creating. But with GPT, all this has become much simpler. We can let GPT complete the content creation we want. Of course, to use GPT to create the content we want, we also need to build a prompt that GPT requires. However, with the demand and feedback from the search engine, using GPT to solve our content creation problem is no longer a problem. Compared with Jasper and Copy.ai, our prompt is undoubtedly more suitable for programmatic SEO.

With keywords, AI can generate content, and the rest is automated. As a technical team, automation and tooling are our strengths. Combined with months of research on Google SEO specifications, we have integrated this knowledge and experience into the tool. Now just enter the search keywords, core views, and select the appropriate template to generate a programmatic SEO landing page that meets SEO specification requirements. In addition, based on our own experience, we have specially created a template called the Aha page. In this template, SEO traffic content and an online application that users can actually operate are integrated into one page.

The experience over the past few months has greatly enhanced my own knowledge of SEO.

Putting aside technical factors, the core purpose of search engine optimization is to provide valuable content that meets the search intent of users to search engines. Programmatic SEO itself is for this purpose. Because everyone searches the search engine with intent, by generating content that highly matches the intent to meet the search intent, it brings real value to users for the search engine.

In addition, the tool we created for ourselves can now be registered and used publicly. The website is https://www.quickcreator.io. Any users sign up this month will get 50% discount. .Regarding SEO, there is one more thing. If you want to get search engine traffic, you should register on Google Search Console as soon as possible. New websites initially have a very low weight for search engine. So even if your content quality is very high, it will not be well indexed and ranked high at the beginning.