SEO: From 100 views to 8K (per day) in 3 weeks

This is not going to be a universal guide for everyone, but rather a story of how our team has started working on SEO to improve results and got from 100/day to 8000/day impressions in 3 weeks.

The goal of this post is to share our steps and have a small retrospection of what we did and how it has impacted our search results.

Please, also note that the product (website) I cover in this post is very specific and the strategy we used may not apply to other SaaS products. In this case, we are going to talk about Projectium website - a new SaaS marketplace for early-stage founders.

PROLOGUE

Technologies are important. The website is built using ReactJS and ApolloClient (GraphQL), we also use Server-Side Rendering on the back end in order to build an HTML page that can be read by Googlebot or any other crawling engine.

While we tried using the latest and best technologies - website performance was not always the best. And the reason for that was lack of development time & maintenance (the main reason), but also because we try to fetch a lot of data on the front end. The average page loading time was ~5-7 sec plus we had issues with post-initial rendering conflicts (called "hydration").

100 -> 8K IMPRESSIONS (4 steps)

1) Website performance

The first thing we focused on in December was website performance. It is clear that User Experience is one of the most significant factors for Search engines like Google - if your site loads slower then the probability of losing top positions is very high.

We started by rewriting our old SSR code.
In past, we had faced some issues with SSR and decided to use unofficial server-side renderers which were a lot slower than the original one. After React 18 announced a new SSR engine we were excited it now supports all we need ("Suspense" arch). Two other major improvements that helped us improve speed were - streamed rendering (demo) and the use of prepass step to fetch data with ApolloClient before render.

Summary (what we did):

1. Reimplemented SSR code with faster engine
2. Cached GraphQL requests on ApolloServer
3. Added cache-control to requests

Result: We had a boost from 100/day to 1K/day

2) Content optimization and Sitemap

We also noticed that the app itself was structured with mistakes. One of them - we where place "small pieces of relevant content" on different pages instead of combining them into one easy-to-read page with "see more" navigation.

Why this was bad? - The answer is you have to make informative pages that will focus on users' attention rather than letting them navigate to another page.

"Soft 404 page" - that's what you'll see in Google Search Console if you have a lot of similar pages with low content information, and usually you can get rid of them completely.

Conclusion - see if you can restructure your app pages.

Plus we wrote a sitemap generation script that collects all the data entities and generates a sitemap.xml file uploaded to S3 bucket. You should always make sure that all your pages are indexable (the ones you need).

Summary (what we did):

1. Reduced Soft 404 count
2. Created a Sitemap generation script (+ CRON job)
3. Marked all user content with "nofollow" / "ugc" attributes to avoid harmful content indexing (prevent spam)

3) Competitive keywords

One good advantage of being a SaaS marketplace is that the best way people find you is by searching for products that are listed on your website.

We used websites like Semrush in order to find the best keywords (product search phrases) looking at 1 - search volume, 2 - competition. Once you find a balance between them, it is not hard to select the best keywords and include them in your SEO (meta title, desc, keywords, content, ...).

By adjusting just a few product pages we were able to gain twice more impressions than we had after performance fixes.

4) Link building

For some keywords, you have to be good (and lucky) enough in order to show in the first 100 results. Getting quality backlinks is a proven way to increase your domain authority.

Backlinks should contain relevant content and come from trusted domains/websites. A few ways that help us to get more quality links:

• Guest posting and news
• Listings/directories
• Asking founders to share a link to their product on Projectium on their official website
• Maintain a Blog and get your articles reshared

Of course, this is not a complete list of steps we made to increase organic traffic, a lot more had been done. Otherwise, the post would be 3 times longer, so I tried to outline only the most important from the past month.

I don't pretend this information is a 100% correct way to increase organic coverage, but that's been our way and it's not finished yet. Please share your thoughts, insights, and your SEO stories in the comments;) I hope my thoughts could help you with ideas and guide you in some way!

Tomorrow is my birthday and I want to thank IndieHackers for letting me share this post! Happy to learn from you! 🎉