I Spent 6 Months on SEO for My Streaming Site — The Traffic Grew, the Revenue Didn't. Here's What Actually Moved the Needle

I run a small streaming subscription site. Six months ago it did almost nothing organically. Today it does about 3,900 pageviews a month from 1,200 visitors.

That's not a big number by Indie Hackers standards, but the process of getting there taught me something I didn't expect: the biggest lesson wasn't really about SEO.

Posting this partly to be useful and partly because I'm stuck on the next decision.

Month 0: The Honest Starting Point

No sitemap. One page. The meta description still had the default template text. Domain Authority Score: 2 out of 100 — effectively invisible.

I'd built the product first and assumed traffic was a problem for later.

That turned out to be the most common mistake in this category, and I walked straight into it.

What I Did, in Order

1. Fixed the boring technical stuff (Week 1)

• Dynamic sitemap
• robots.txt
• Per-page titles and meta descriptions
• JSON-LD schema
• Canonical tags

This took two days and was probably the highest ROI-per-hour work I did during the entire six months.

Not because it immediately brought traffic — it brought almost none.

But nothing else works properly until the basics are done.

2. Built country-specific landing pages (Weeks 2–6)

Instead of one generic page trying to rank for everything, I built separate pages for the four countries that mattered most to my market.

Each one got:

• Its own keyword research
• Its own copy
• Its own schema
• Content written around that country's specific search intent

They weren't templates with the country name swapped out.

This was the single biggest ranking change.

Search intent for something like "best X in Germany" and "best X in the UK" is genuinely different. One page usually can't serve both properly.

The mistake I made was building four country pages at once instead of proving the concept with one first.

3. Wrote guides, not blog posts (Weeks 6–16)

I focused on:

• Setup guides for specific devices
• "How to" pages
• Cost breakdowns
• Troubleshooting content

Basically, anything where the person searching had an actual problem to solve.

My best-performing page is a device setup tutorial that took around four hours to write. It now brings more traffic than my homepage did during month one.

Meanwhile, almost everything I wrote that looked like "industry trends" content got zero traffic.

Every time.

Intent-led pages won. Opinion pages lost.

4. Guest posts for backlinks (Month 4 onwards)

With an Authority Score of 2, I eventually hit the ceiling of what on-page work alone could do.

So I started placing a small number of guest articles on relevant tech and lifestyle publications.

One of those placements has sent 51 real visitors.

That's not a huge number, but those visitors convert better than my search traffic does.

More importantly, the additional authority seemed to improve rankings for pages I hadn't touched in weeks.

Two things I'd tell anyone doing this:

• Point links at different relevant internal pages instead of sending everything to the homepage.
• Don't publish several placements all at once. A sudden velocity spike can look unnatural and creates an obvious footprint.

The Part That Actually Mattered

This is where it got uncomfortable.

After all that SEO work, I finally stopped staring at the traffic chart and looked properly at the funnel.

1,282 sessions reached the homepage.

185 reached checkout.

That's roughly 14%.

Six months of SEO had grown the top of the funnel by around 8x.

The homepage-to-checkout conversion rate had barely moved.

That meant every hour I spent earning a new visitor was only worth 14% of what it potentially could have been.

And improving that 14% was probably a one-day job.

I'd ignored it for six months because traffic charts are much more satisfying to look at than conversion charts.

What I Changed

• Made the pricing section reachable in one tap on mobile
• Made one plan the obvious default instead of showing four equally weighted options
• Moved payment methods and the refund policy above the fold
• Reduced the number of decisions before checkout from three to one

The lesson was simple:

If you're doing SEO on a product that converts badly, you're building a bigger funnel with the same hole in the bottom.

I knew that abstractly.

I still did everything in the wrong order.

The site is https://onetvbox.com if the context helps.

What I'd Do Differently

• Do a conversion audit before the SEO sprint. Even a rough one.
• Prove one country page before scaling. Building four at once made it difficult to identify what was actually working.
• Do technical SEO in week one, always. It's a small amount of work, but everything downstream depends on it.
• Skip trend and opinion content unless the goal is brand awareness or backlink placement rather than organic traffic.
• Measure checkout starts, not just sessions, from day one.

Where I'm Stuck

Here's the actual question.

I have limited hours each week and two options.

Option A: Build more localized landing pages

Target countries already appearing in my analytics but without dedicated pages yet.

Pros:

• Clear search intent
• Low competition
• Can compound over time
• No ongoing cost once the page is built

Cons:

• Slow burn
• Can take months to rank
• Each page takes significant research and writing time

Option B: Keep building backlinks through guest articles

Raise overall domain authority and potentially lift rankings across existing pages.

Pros:

• Can strengthen the whole domain
• Existing pages may benefit without being rewritten
• Can potentially speed up ranking improvements

Cons:

• Costs money per placement
• Doesn't compound as cleanly without continued investment
• Eventually hits a ceiling

My instinct says Option A: localized pages.

The authority I already have seems sufficient to compete for some low-competition local queries, and successful pages could continue bringing traffic without ongoing spend.

But I've already been wrong about sequencing once on this project.

So I'm curious:

For anyone who has grown a site past the "2 out of 100 authority" stage, what moved the needle further for you: publishing new high-intent pages or building more links?

And maybe more importantly:

At what point did backlinks stop being the main bottleneck and content coverage or conversion optimization become the bigger opportunity?