My Painfull SEO Journey (part 1)
I’m pretty sure everyone has heard of SEO, and I’m even more sure everyone hates it. At least I do. This is the start of my SEO journey as an aspiring founder with an up-and-coming project.
Domain Authority
I only registered my domain name last week, so as of now it has a rating of 0. This means search engines like Google don't trust it, therefore they don't show it on the front page. Or probably even the second page. It's just hidden from the public behind pages and pages of domains that rank better.
Obviously, I need to increase its domain authority. I'm using a free tool by Ahrefs to monitor it. https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker
Backlink
This is one method to increase your domain authority. A backlink is a link from another website that links people to your site. The more backlinks the higher your domain rating can get - as long as they are good, high-quality backlinks. Backlinks from sites with higher domain authority help your site out more.
So far my site has 1 backlink, I didn't ask for it and it's just from some scammy startup directory thing so it's meaningless. So how do you get backlinks?
Well, take this with a pinch of salt because I haven't got any 😂, but my approach is blogging. I've started a blog page where I talk about what my project is about and why it's useful. Hopefully, people will stumble across these posts and then link to them from their site. We'll wait and see.
Keywords
This one makes a bit more sense, people search for a product on Google and Google responds with sites that match as many of the keywords they are searching for as possible. So just spam loads of keywords right? No, ranking on Google for some keywords is way more difficult than it is for others. If a keyword has a high difficulty rating your site needs a higher domain authority to have a chance at ranking for that keyword.
This means for newer sites you should be targeting keywords that have less competition, there are loads of free tools that can help you find keywords to target.
My Progress So Far
Domain Authority: 0
Backlinks: 1
My project is hosted on Vercel which comes with a built-in analytics dashboard to see how many visitors my site gets and where they come from. As of 26/03/25 I'm averaging about 20 visitors/day, 2-3 of which are completely organic from search engines.
I'm in the same boat for my project I know the pain. my Dr is at 1.3 now so it's growing but slowly. submitted to a bunch of directories hopefully it increases at a faster rate
Nice one, let me know how the directories go. I’ve just done the same!
what i've seen to work out the best(and fastest) to increase DR with legitimacy is- different approaches in different tiers.
T1: When You're DR 0-20, Costs $0/mo
SaaS Directory submissions, Founder Interview, Guest Posting on other SaaS sites(free ones, of course). The reason other approaches won't work here is because almost no legit brands will link to a site with DR this low.
Tip- you can always use Ahrefs on where other growing SaaS has been doing it and replicate.
T2: DR 20-30- Costs >$500/mo
Paid guest posts from relevant, growing, spam-free sites, most likely saas like yours. 3-5 links/mo shall be covered within $500 if you deal with the webmasters directly.
While screening sites, make sure they're-
1. From a relevant site or article
2. Diviersified across your homepage, landing pages, and blogposts
2. Anchor text is a partial match to your page's main/secondary keywords(or keywords that you're
T3: DR 30-40- Costs >$1.5-2k/mo
No more paid links at this stage.
You'll start getting a lot of link placement requests and hence can demand for links in exchange, typically known as A-B-C placements. Be a little careful about to whom and from which sites the links are going and coming from, and this should be a good go-to approach towards a DR 60+ state.
Next, you can start outreaching to authority sites/mags/platforms and get 3-5 of such links. The relevancy can be a bit broaden up if the site's a really good one. The money mostly goes here. Paired with the first approach, you're easily off to a DR 80 in 2 years.
Hi Daniel, nice article. I am also a tech founder working on SEO. Here's a suggestion that I have for you that has started to work for me - submitting your project to startup directories. I have submitted my app to around 18-20 directories by now, and I am starting to see an uptick in traffic.
Here's an old IH post about it: Directory Submissions: Lessons from Launching to 100+ SaaS Directories - Indie Hackers
Same guy's bluesky post that I found really helpful: Johnny Builds: "Follow along as I try launching my #buildinpublic project to a big list of directories from @onlinedopamine.com
Awesome thanks for the links to the directories. Did you see a noticeable jump in domain authority after doing this? I’m wondering if its more bot traffic
An important point is that I am still on waiting period of many of the directories I submitted to. Only around half of the 18-20 have published my link, the major one being Betalist.
I check Ahrefs for my domain rating. My DR has very nominal increase, I will just say that from zero, it has become non-zero now ;-)
And yeah, I saw genuine traffic coming to my app called Clear Mail for Gmail, as I could see an uptick in app installs in the Chrome Web store.
Good stuff! I’ll add mine to some directories tonight and write a little update next week.
This comment was deleted a year ago
No worries! I’m going to post an update next week