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Share your SEO growth

I'm fairly new to the SEO game with my project Hive Index, and am constantly wondering - "Is my setup correct? Am I on the right trajectory? How do I benchmark against others?"

So to bring some visibility for other indie hackers, share your search engine console chart, and describe your overall SEO strategy.

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    seo growth

    For the Hive Index, I take a long tail approach. The site is actually thousands of individual urls in order to index not just for "entrepreneurship communities" but "entrepreneurship communities on discord" or "entrepreneurship communities with a newsletter".

    I've been live for 2 months, and am slowly growing. Anyone else take this approach? How did the first couple of months look for you?

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      Great that you are seeing growth as a result of your efforts!

      SEO as you probably know is a game in the long run and can often be difficult for Indie hackers because one often sees results after a long time, making it difficult to know exactly what a spike could be due to.

      We have a few SEO successes with our site, as well. Among other things that have worked for us, I have made a post here at IH about how we have beaten Search Engine Journal and Yoast in an "SEO" related query, as well as describing how this can be replicated by others: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/this-is-how-we-beat-sej-and-yoast-in-seo-4859d97298

      What I immediately think could put your rankings in rocket speed is more text that describes each topic, community, etc. in more detail and depth so that Google can actually understand the context and a whole lot of contextually relevant links to enhance your popularity and relevance to these search terms.

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        Thanks for the tip, that's really appreciated. It's been on my roadmap to go through and refresh the content on each page (or add to topics/communities that don't have a description). Have been putting it off for obvious reasons, it's not going to be as fun as marketing/development of the platform.

        But validating to hear from someone really knowledgeable about SEO that it'll be worthwhile. Thanks! Let me know if anything else comes to mind.

        Also - if you have a search engine console screenshot of the growth from some of your SEO successes, I'd love to see what that looks like!

        I signed up for the Tabtimize beta btw. looking forward to it :)

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          I'm glad you could use my comment.

          Thank you for signing up, I really appreciate that.

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      thanks for this. great post. my question is how do I look up the rank of my website? (Link https://dynastykarakul.com/)

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        You can sign up for google search console here. You'll need to verify domain ownership through your DNS (unless you originally registered your domain form google), and then you'll see a dashboard that has metrics about your search performance. you'll be able to submit sitemaps with new urls to be indexed, and see if any submitted pages have any issues that are stopping them from being indexed.

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    BRG SEO

    We launched https://brguide.com in November, seeing some growth without a tremendous number of backlinks (really 0 right now).

    Our strategy has been to go after a lot of long-tail restaurant searches. In the US/UK/EU these are pretty well covered but in countries like Japan, Singapore, Australia, etc, almost nobody is writing about these. So we're really seeing good presence from those countries.

    Our ultimate goal is to start ranking for city pages (best restaurants in NYC) but these are dominated by the Yelps / Infatuation, etc. Gonna be a while ;)

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      Very cool, thanks for sharing! Beautiful site. I like the long tail approach too, hope it pays off for you eventually.

      How do you get the info on the restaurants? Are you curating them manually or pulling from an API?

      Also, are you considering adding metadata on the restaurants that can be individual long-tail pages as well? for example, "restaurants in NYC that have outdoor dining" or "restaurants in Singapore that take reservations"

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        Painstakingly manual. We carved out a list of about 4000 of the top awarded and talked about restaurants, then we did a big cycle of data collection (instagram, website, address, URL, etc) and wrote descriptions for each.

        Re: long-tail pages, yes this is absolutely on our radar, just not sure where to start. For instance, "NYC restaurants with rooftops" is a good one but that's just a level of granularity that we might not be able to accomplish for a while.

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          yeah I can see that being really hard to get that info for all restaurants. BTW your embedded screenshot above is throwing a 410 error

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    Thanks for sharing this! I'm picking up an old project (https://youcallme.io) which has a flat SEO growth curve at the moment but a few customers come by every week. So I decided to try a new technique similar to yours of long tail SEO with many pages to rank (e.g. https://youcallme.io/equifax, https://youcallme.io/microsoft, https://youcallme.io/metlife). I just put them up this morning but I noticed that though Google crawls them they choose not to index: "Crawled - currently not indexed"

    Have you dealt with this before with https://thehiveindex.com?

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      Nice site! Yeah I've noticed that with new urls as well. They should get indexed after a couple of days. I'm not sure why there's a delay, but for me they always come through eventually. Here's the official google response to this.

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        Thanks for the info!

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    I have one number and that is: 0️⃣

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      Is SEO a part of your growth strategy?

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        In the long term yes, was just a joke because we haven't even launched anything :)

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          haha okay. good luck with the launch

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    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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      I plan to monetize by offering sponsored listings for paid communities (similar to the yelp model)

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        This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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