SaaS founders: Get more Google traffic with "Powered by" SEO

I've been reading through the Stories database and noticed one acquisition channel that founders keep praising:

• SEO has been the most successful marketing tool for me. —Erwin from Tailscan, $4k/mo

• Another big acquisition channel is SEO. —Tibo, doing $28k/mo with 3 products  

• SEO brings in at least 40% of StageTimer’s volume. —Lukas from StageTimer, $15k/mo

SEO (search engine optimization) is a set of skills that you learn with one goal: increasing traffic from Google Search.

Here's how successful SaaS founders increase their Google traffic

I've discovered there are 3 main approaches that SaaS founders take to increase their traffic from Google:

Rank directly for your product keywords

This works well if you're in a small niche. StageTimer used this approach successfully:

“SEO is kind of a superpower when you have a niche solution. You target these very specific low-volume keywords and you have very high conversion because there's nothing else there.”

Create free tools and rank them

Some people call this approach side-project marketing.

With side-project marketing, you create and rank free tools in your niche. You then redirect this search traffic to your main product.

Tibo has used this approach successfully for his own products:

“I create free tools that aim at ranking and redirecting traffic to my main software. I try to build at least one every two weeks, and that adds up. I don't do super-deep keyword analysis or anything, but about 20% of them get solid traffic and that's enough to compound in a big way.”

Use content marketing 

Here, you create informational content related to your niche. Parquet ($108k/mo) is a financial portfolio tracker focused on the DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) countries. They found success with using content marketing to get search traffic:

“We also started serious programmatic SEO with pages for stocks, ETFs, dividends, etc. It's a great channel for guest traffic, some of which converts to users.”

There are different flavours of content marketing. One of them is programmatic SEO. Another is creating conventional, long-form articles (here's an example).

You could also write shorter articles, depending on the niche. Erwin from Tailscan, for example, wrote technical help articles about Tailwind:

“But SEO has been the most successful marketing tool for me. I was surprised at how long it took to take off, but now it’s responsible for 70 to 80 percent of my traffic.

“Part of this comes from having lots of pages on the site with technical help like info about Tailwind classes. Individually, these pages don’t bring in that many visitors, but together, they result in decent traffic.”

A new mental model: "Powered by" marketing

Before we talk about "powered by" SEO, let's talk about "powered by" marketing.

A few years ago, I wrote a post about a relatively unknown marketing channel. It's called "powered by" marketing.

"Powered by" marketing is when your customers indirectly endorse your product while using it. The way they do that is by displaying a "powered by" link when using your software. Here's an example:

Now, "powered by" marketing comes in many forms. Take EndCrawl ($40k/mo), A SaaS tool for generating end credits for movies:

“Worked: Native Ads

“We place our name and logo in all new Endcrawl projects. Customers can remove them if they like, of course, but the power of default is strong. As a result, our name and logo are sprinkled across hundreds of films and will be seen for many years to come.”

EndCrawl used "powered by" marketing by displaying a simple mention in all new projects that people create with their software.

Powered-by SEO: A new approach to future-proof your SEO

A few days ago, Elena Verna, a software SEO consultant, wrote an article on how software companies can use user-generated content to rank for thousands of search terms. Here are some examples:

Notion

Notion has Notion Templates, an URL with thousands of user-generated templates for various niches.

If someone writes "startup funding template" onto Google, for example, they could stumble upon this Notion template.

Miro

Miro has the Miroverse, which is a set of whiteboards that people have created on all sorts of topics; 

If someone types "journey map SaaS' onto Google, for example, they could potentially see this whiteboard.

Figma

Figma has a bunch of design resources created by its community, ranging from templates, wireframes, plugins, and so on.

If someone types "donut chart" onto Google, they might stumble upon this Figma design.

Here's the "catch" with all of these examples:

To use this "user-generated" content, you need to sign up for the software (Notion, Figma, or Miro). The content is very closely linked to the software. You could say that the content is "powered by" the software.

This is why I think a more appropriate name for this technique is "powered by" SEO.

How can you use "powered by" SEO as an indie hacker?

How to use this principle as an indie hacker

To give you an idea on how you can use "powered by" SEO as an indie hacker, I've chosen a few products from our Products Database. Here are some ideas:

• A cold email SaaS: Share personalized templates you could edit/bulk send to people.

• Project management SaaS: Share templates you can start with. For example, a team-to-do template; quarterly KPIs template, etc.

• Accountability tool: Share goals/goals categories that people might add to your tool.

The pattern here is to:

• Extract what people are already doing with your software

• Connect that output to a JTBD people are searching for on Google (a todo template, for example).

• Create useful pages with that content.

• Have a pitch: To start using this template right away, sign up for Y, where Y is your SaaS.

Here's a useful AI prompt to get started

Here's a useful prompt you can enter into a tool such as ChatGPT and get "powered by" SEO ideas for your niche: 

One good way to rank for a lot of keywords is to connect your software to what people are searching for:

• Notion has notion templates which rank for keywords such as "startup funding template."

• Miro has a directory which ranks for keywords such as "journey map SaaS"

• Figma has design resources and they rank for keywords such as "donut chart."

This is content that users have created with the software, and the software provider is just sharing that content.

Give me ideas on how I can use this principle for this product: [describe your product here]

Let's try "email deliverability software" and see what ideas ChatGPT came up with:

This approach is more effective in some niches than others, but it can be used to generate valuable ideas in almost any software industry.