This founder grew his site's monthly traffic to 120k before building a $30k MRR product

Andrew Fennell launched a service to crickets and realized he needed to learn SEO. Soon, he was able to turn his site into a profitable business by selling ads. And then, he pivoted, using the traffic to funnel users to a SaaS product.

Today, StandOut CV is bringing in $30k MRR.

Here's Andrew on how he did it. 👇

From services to ads to SaaS

I started my working life in recruitment, but didn't really enjoy it, so I was always launching online businesses on the side — most of which failed.

Eventually, I launched a CV writing service. I spent weeks creating the website on Shopify and was totally shocked when the site didn't get any visitors. I tried running some Google Ads, but they were hugely expensive and wiped out most of our profits. So I dedicated the next few years to learning SEO and applying it to the site to attract customers in a sustainable way.

I grew the site to a few hundred visitors per month within the first 3 months. And eventually, after a lot of hard work, mistakes, learnings, and persistence, I got to several hundred thousand visitors per month.

Over the years, I turned the website into a huge resource library for job seekers. And I changed the business model twice, from services to selling advertising, and then from that to a SaaS model.

The SaaS model worked. Our CV generator app, StandOut CV, has now generated £1 million in revenue since its launch, and it's currently at £30K MRR. We have over 23,000 paying customers.

All-in on SEO

Our first and most important product is the website.

We created a huge library of CV advice articles that has attracted over 18 million organic visitors in total.

The website drives traffic and builds trust with people. Without that, the app has no customers and the business fails. SEO is the sole driver of leads and signups to the business.

It took me years to build a website driving thousands of daily visitors from search — here are the key steps I took to get there:

1. Lots of quality content: I focused on publishing in-depth, genuinely useful resources for job seekers. Everything from CV templates and example CVs for different roles, to detailed guides on interviews, cover letters, and job search strategy. Each piece was designed to fully answer the searcher’s question and be the best resource on the topic, which steadily built topical authority and organic visibility, while gaining trust from users.

2. Honest, scalable link building: Instead of chasing shortcuts or buying links, I built relationships and created assets worth linking to. I wrote guest posts for career sites and blogs, pitched data-driven content to journalists, and created “link magnets”, such as unique CV statistics and studies, that earned coverage from major publications. This approach meant backlinks grew steadily and safely, supporting long-term rankings and avoiding Google penalties.

3. Maintaining a solid technical foundation: From the start, I kept the site fast, secure, and easy for search engines to crawl. I used clean, lightweight code, fixed crawl errors, improved internal linking, and ensured pages were mobile-friendly. Regular technical audits helped me catch issues early so the site could scale to millions of visitors without performance or indexing problems.

I have to say, the process of building a website, producing high-quality content that supports users, and watching it rank and drive traffic is immensely satisfying.

And I think SEO is one of the best ways that small businesses can compete with big corporations. Even though it's more challenging in 2025, we are still able to outrank global brands with our content and drive plenty of high-converting traffic to our app.

Content marketing at scale

With that said, one of the biggest challenges I faced in growing traffic with SEO was figuring out how to produce content at scale.

When I was writing a few articles a week myself, it was easy to keep the quality high. But once I started publishing 20+ articles a month and bringing in writers and editors, it became really tough to stay on top of everything and maintain the standard that both Google and readers expect.

I overcame this by building a clear content workflow. I created detailed briefs and style guides so writers understood exactly what each article needed to cover and how it should be structured. I also put in place an editorial review process — every piece is checked for accuracy, search intent, and on-page SEO before it goes live. Over time, this system meant we could produce 20+ high-quality articles a month without losing the depth and usefulness readers expect.

It's also important to invest time in hiring and training good writers — and paying them well. Without them, the whole process falls apart.

Building the product

After a few years of growing the website traffic and turning it into a successful advertising business, I decided that we would build our own resume/CV builder app, and start selling directly to our visitors.

The product needed to be good, so I re-invested some of our profits into hiring an agency to build the app professionally — but it still required a lot of input from me.

I designed all of the features, functions, page layouts, user paths, resume templates, etc., and essentially worked as a product manager for the app while still managing SEO for the site. The initial build took around 6 months and cost £30K, with another 6 months of live testing and improvements.

We started gathering user feedback early on to learn what customers wanted from the app, and also hired a consultant — someone who helped build one of our competitors' apps — to guide us on what features to focus on building.

Choose your paywall wisely

As I said, we use a SaaS model. Customers can build their CV and try out all features for free — they only have to pay once they are 100% happy with their CV and want to download it. This creates much less friction than asking for payment before the user accesses the app, because customers are already happy with the product and the CV they have built.

We offer an initial low-cost two-week trial for £2.70, which then rolls into a £16.95 monthly subscription that can be cancelled at any time. If you run a subscription business, it’s vital to make it clear how easy it is for customers to cancel — many people have been burned by subscription traps in the past and are understandably cautious.

Choose a niche without high churn rates

The biggest challenge we face with our app is retention. If customers build a good CV with our app, then they quickly land a job and no longer need the product. They might return for a few months if they move jobs next year, but it's almost impossible to retain long-term customers for an app like this.

We've experimented with different features to keep people on board longer, but ultimately, I would avoid building an app in the careers space again. Instead, I would focus on building an essential product that the customer needs to keep indefinitely. That way, LTV is increased and revenues are more predictable.

An SEO-centered stack

We built our site on WordPress and host it with Kinsta, a combination that keeps it fast and delivers a great user experience. We originally started with cheap hosting and a DIY site builder, but once the business grew and traffic increased, we had to migrate to a more reliable setup.

We also use a few essential plugins for SEO, performance, and security enhancements - the 2 most important are:

• WP Rocket: improves performance and page load times

• All-in-one-SEO: allows you to add and edit essential SEO features like meta titles and sitemaps

The CV builder app’s backend runs on Django with a Python RESTful API, and the front end is served via Netlify.

Build an audience first

Make sure that you have a potential audience and a real problem that people will pay to solve before you start building anything.

I’ve built plenty of websites and products that I thought would be hugely popular, only to be bitterly disappointed when no one cared. For example, I once spent months creating a fancy-dress website where people could design their own superhero costume — I thought it was brilliant, but had to shut it down when I realized no one else agreed.

I’d even go as far as to say, build your audience first, then your product — but only once you’ve validated that there’s real commercial potential. That’s exactly what I did with StandOut CV.

By building an audience through SEO, social media, and other channels, you can start by monetizing with ads before you launch a product.

Ultimately, I believe having an audience is more powerful than having a product in most cases. With an amazing product and no audience, you’ll make no sales. But with an engaged audience and even an average product, you’ll do alright.

What's next?

I am now focused on helping SaaS businesses grow their traffic and revenue with SEO via my new business LinkQuest.

We've got in-depth SEO guides and resources for those who want to learn SEO, and we offer consultancy and agency services for founders and marketing teams who need hands-on help with their SEO.

Check out my ultimate SaaS SEO guide, which is the most in-depth SaaS SEO guide on the internet, showing you how to grow traffic and revenue with SEO — step by step. And my free SaaS SEO checklist, which is an interactive checklist that breaks SEO best practices into simple, actionable steps.

And here's my LinkedIn if you'd like to connect.