I ranked 17/20 Blogs on #1 page of Google! [AMA]

Hi IndieHackers!

Excited to share this small success with you all.

I recently did SEO with blog posts for one of my clients and achieved massive success!

Don't worry, I'm here to reveal all the hacks I followed that got most of our keywords (... drum roll!) to the #1 page of Google.

The Niche

Of course, it was a SaaS product as I love creating and implementing SEO strategies for it. It was a website builder that required a few clicks to build a website, blazing fast.

Target Audience

Product sellers, entrepreneurs and online coaches.

Our Strategy

1. Targeted medium difficulty keywords

I noticed, they had some organic traffic because of some keywords that were already ranking on SERP.

Thus, I didn't target low-difficulty keywords to write blog posts on. The site already had some authority which made me confident enough to go for even medium and tough difficulty keywords (For those who aren't aware of the term keyword difficulty, it's a metric that estimates how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google)

2. Competitor Research

I ran competitor research with SEMrush to find keywords that their competitors were ranking for. Also, I added a filter to look for those keywords that were easier to rank and kept the intent "informative". (Let's grab the low-hanging fruits first!).

3. Develop compelling Titles for good CTR

Once the keywords were finalized, I made Titles and H1s out of them for blog posts. IMO, the focus should always be to express the answer to users' search intent through your SEO title. And that's what improves the Click Through Rate. For generating catchy titles, H1 and paras, you can use this free content generator.

As Google says there’s NO limit on title tag length but many SEOs recommend a title tag length of approximately 50 to 70 chars. And that's what is visible on Google. We sticked to this.

4. Creating valuable content

Some of you might be curious to know if I created the content with AI but NO, we didn't :)

I analyzed the top results for keywords that we wanted to rank on. And, noted down the topics which they aren't covering and which can be of immense value to the readers. Also added questions from "People Also Ask section". This was an important move to consider.

5. On-page SEO

Finally followed all on-page SEO factors that can push the blog to 1st page of Google. But even before SEO enters the game, the content must fulfill the user's intent.

• A catchy meta title with keyword in it
• H1 with keyword
• Meta description that says it all
• Keyword in the 1st paragraph
• Interlinking with optimized anchor text
• Image Alt Text (Descriptive one)
• Made sure to upload images in webp format. (helps loading faster)

However, this movie doesn't have a happy ending :( I waited for a while to see these posts ranking but wasn't able to move the needle. Even the client was questioning me.

And Finally, I figured out the posts weren't indexed on Google. Requested indexing on search console and boom we made it to the top :)

Result: The site is currently ranking #1 for the keyword "nurture millionaire mindset" and many others.

Added CTA at the end (not as a part of SEO) but it would play a major role in keeping up the revenue.