How We Grew From 0 to 1,000 Ranking Keywords in Just 30 Days

Hello there!

Growing a startup is always an uphill battle, especially when you’re trying to scale your digital presence without burning cash on ads or expensive marketing tools. At RivalSense, our B2B SaaS platform that helps businesses monitor their competitors, we faced the same challenge. But within just one month, we managed to get over 1,000 ranking keywords organically, without spending a single dollar on paid marketing. Here’s how we did it.

Leverage What You Already Have: Data-Driven Content Automation

The first idea channel that got us to scale so quickly was something many startups overlook—the data they already have.

At RivalSense, our core product revolves around company monitoring, collecting tons of data about thousands of companies, from their management structures to recent announcements. We realized this was a goldmine for content creation. Rather than sitting on this data, we decided to turn it into automatically generated content.

Every day, we produce about 100 intel pages, each focused on a different company. Each of these pages contains essential business information like:

• Company management teams
• Headquarters and office locations
• Employee numbers
• Latest press releases and announcements
• Competitor insights

These pages are not manually written. Instead, they are dynamically generated using data that our tool pulls in automatically. This means we’re scaling content production at a pace that would be impossible to maintain manually. It also means each new page is optimized for search engines, targeting long-tail keywords related to small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have much competition in search rankings.

The result? Our pages get indexed quickly by Google and often rank on the first page for searches related to those specific companies. This approach alone drove a massive increase in our keyword rankings, especially for niche and localized queries.

Free Marketing Through a Newsletter: The YC Generative AI Pulse

While content automation was driving our keyword rankings, we knew we needed more ways to attract relevant traffic to RivalSense without splurging on paid channels. That’s when we came up with our second strategy: a free newsletter.

We launched the YC Generative AI Pulse, a weekly roundup of the latest news and trends from Y Combinator’s Generative AI startups. The beauty of this approach was that we didn’t have to dig for news manually. RivalSense’s data engine was already tracking updates from various companies, including those from Y Combinator, so it was a simple process of curating this data into a newsletter format.

Here’s why this newsletter strategy worked so well:

• Email capture: Every newsletter sign-up meant we were collecting valuable email addresses of startup founders, investors, and other industry insiders. These emails are invaluable for future marketing efforts, whether it’s for direct product outreach or sending targeted content.

• Organic traffic boost: Since the newsletter featured specific companies and their updates, we noticed an uptick in organic traffic from people searching for those companies. Our newsletter content would rank in searches related to the companies we featured, helping us further expand our keyword reach.

• Brand authority: By being the go-to source for news on YC Generative AI startups, we quickly established RivalSense as an authority in this space. This helped drive both trust and traffic, further reinforcing our SEO efforts.

Building Authority with Zero Dollar Marketing

The key to our growth in keyword rankings and traffic came from two principles: automation and leveraging existing data. By focusing on what we were already doing (monitoring companies and aggregating data), we turned our product’s output into a content engine that worked for us. And because we automated much of the process, we kept costs to a bare minimum, letting us scale rapidly without additional headcount or marketing expenses.

Our journey to 1,000 ranking keywords in a month didn’t come from throwing money at ads or hiring a large content team. Instead, we harnessed the power of automation and focused on niche audiences—all while sticking to a zero-dollar marketing strategy. By automating content creation, targeting long-tail keywords, and launching a highly relevant newsletter, we achieved explosive SEO growth at no cost.

Cheers, and good luck in your hunt for ranking keywords!