Bootstrapping SEO for a micro-SaaS

Earlier this year, I embarked on developing my first micro-SaaS product: redirect.monster. It enables website admins (especially with no technical background) to setup and manage domain redirects, pretty unsexy but this is what makes it interesting. Usually, people don't care about redirects until they need to implement them. So what happens? They google the problem and search for solutions which makes my product a perfect candidate for SEO (search engine optimisation).

Step 1 - Shooting for the stars: Targeting high-volume search terms with GPT-grade blog articles - Failed

With marketing, you need to start somewhere so here is what I did: I created a blog and started writing a few articles targeting high-volume keywords related to my product using ChatGPT for most of the content:

Understanding Web Redirections: A Clear Guide

Web redirections guide users and search engines to the correct URL, key for site updates and SEO. Types include 301 (permanent) and 302 (temporary).

Rewrite vs. Redirect: Which is Best for Your SEO Strategy?

Explore the impact of URL rewrites vs. redirects on SEO, learn best practices, and avoid common mistakes to optimize your website’s performance and ranking.

HTTP Status Codes: Understanding 301 vs. 302 Redirects

Explore the nuances of 301 vs. 302 redirects: key for SEO & web development. Learn best practices and impacts.

Unsurprisingly, this strategy did not yield significant results.

Step 2 - Boiling the ocean: Search terms clustering and industrial writing - Failed

After looking for 1-2 tips on how to rank, I tumbled over an interview of a SEO expert who explained his approach to automate SEO with a no-code workflow (using n8n and GPT-4):

I followed the approach (in a rather quick and dirty), clustering keywords to end-up with the following blog structure and started writing articles (using ChatGPT as well):

• Redirects
• DNS Management
• Technical SEO
• Troubleshooting
• Best Practices
• How-to Guides
• Use Cases

It seemed to have no significant impact. And after a few dozen of articles, my results on search console were the following:

Step 3: Competing for niches: Targeting low-search keywords

With no improvement in search results, I sought advice from the Build in Public community on X. After a few hours, I got a reply from Ameer Asghar who gave me very valuable hints, which he summarised later in a post:

Step 4: Finding something useful that people are proactively searching for - The case for Free Tools

While researching low-search keywords, I noticed several indie hackers recommending building free tools as the best SEO tactics for driving traffic for their website so I decided to try. How did I find free tools ideas? I checked which free tools might be related to my product and guess what? Those free tool were way more searched than my product!

So I ended up building a redirect checker (adding some targeted search-terms in the FAQ of the tool):

Redirect.Monster | Redirect Checker Tool - Check redirect trace form a URL source

Check your URL, follow the redirect trace and fix redirect issues with Redirect.Monster. A free online tool to identify common issues such as broken redirects, expirect tls/ssl certificate, redirection loops.

Redirect.Monster

And here are the results:

My product started being displayed on Google searches way more often that it was before (12,300 vs 79 over a similar time period). The number of clicks also increased significantly (73 vs 15 over a similar time period).

Since the publication of the tool in May, I did not invested time in Marketing as I'm working on other projects in parallel BUT I continue to get several signups per week (with no efforts).

Takeaways

For future products, I will immediately explore potential free tools as both SEO boost and lead magnet and then compete for low-volume / niche search terms as it seems currently the best technique to get slowly but steadily started with SEO.