SEO-first is a long-term strategy

Do not use an SEO-first marketing strategy if you need to acquire customers ASAP. Use it if you have a long-term horizon on your project and are ready to wait at least 3 to 6 months to get steady organic visitors.

🥳 First visitor

It took 19 days to get the first visitor after I published the first long-form article on how to take a screenshot with Puppeteer for my second project — screenshot API. From 5 till 24 on January 2022.

I did not perform research for the first article. I started designing my project and searched for how I would solve the screenshot problem for myself. And then carefully answered all my questions with working code snippets.

Once the post was ready, I crossposted it to Medium, DEV Community, and Hashnode, specifying my site URL as canonical.

📝 Next posts

For the next posts, I used Google Search Console and observed for what keywords my site had been ranking. And I wrote more articles that have high-quality answers for these keywords: "puppeteer block requests", and "puppeteer screenshot element", and "puppeteer proxy".

The tactic had its results. After a while, the post on how to block requests with Puppeteer got to the first page of Google and started to rank higher:

💪 Steady visitors

Only after 3 months (in April) I started to receive steady and organic traffic on the site:

🚀 Next steps

The next steps are:

• write more screenshot API related posts and rearrange the current posts with a call to action;
• finish building the project;
• launch project on different platforms;
• get first paying customers;
• repeat for the next projects, but in parallel with using quicker channels to get the first customers.

🤪 Bets

As idea to discuss. I don't have such a long time horizon, but! imagine that you can create many different sites on different topics. Then wait for a while, see which one is taken off the ground, and then invest all your time in it.

Originally was published on my blog for backup.