Every SEO strategy that worked for SaaS founders

SiteGPT (Banu): Banu has built almost 50 free tools that rank on Google. He searches Ahrefs Keywords Explorer with a blank query, filters for words like 'AI' and 'generator', keyword difficulty under 10 and volume over 1,000, then plans a call to action under each tool that points to SiteGPT. With Cursor, a new tool takes him under five minutes. [source]

Two AI apps (ResumeMaker.online): He built about 30 free tools that complement his main products, and SEO became his main traffic channel. His point: free tools bring search traffic even if you are not an SEO expert. [source]

Setter AI: Alongside comparison articles and YouTube videos, the founders run a free sales script generator to pull in search traffic for their AI cold-calling product. [source]

AI video app: He built dedicated landing pages and free tools to rank on Google, as part of an all-organic launch with no VC money. [source]

Super Demo: Ungated free tools are one of the organic channels the team credits, next to comparison pages, programmatic pages and building in public. [source]

Elephas: Aayush starts with two or three blog posts a week and scales to six or seven, working from a list of 30 to 50 keywords. He uses AI only as a research assistant and says adding net new information to the internet is how you win at SEO. [source]

Angel Match and Investor Hunt: Rashid hired six content writers, published blog posts consistently and launched free tools. That growth took him from $3K to $20K MRR, and Investor Hunt makes about $2,800 MRR from SEO alone. [source]

One-website media business: He got his first traffic purely from SEO and still creates as much content as possible: each long-form video is cut into short clips, and the scripts are turned into blog posts to rank on Google. [source]

Pinterest pin SaaS (Nick): Early on, Nick wrote many articles, reached out to influencers, posted on Reddit and worked on backlinks. He says that grind later snowballed into SEO traffic on autopilot. [source]

Affiliate comparison website (Alex): Alex warns that stale content will not win on Google. Expect rankings to erode over time and keep creating fresh content within your area of expertise to hold on to revenue. [source]

Two AI apps (ResumeMaker.online): Winning Product of the Week on Product Hunt helped ResumeMaker.online spread quickly and brought in many backlinks. [source]

AI image generator: She launches on Product Hunt mainly for the SEO backlink, and says its visibility is not as good as it used to be. [source]

Notion Forms: Product Hunt badges worked as SEO backlinks, alongside the product's built-in viral loop. [source]

AI video app: He posted his early, imperfect product on Hacker News to get initial traction and backlinks. [source]

Automation micro-SaaS (Demitro): His Product Hunt launch helped with awareness and with SEO. Google is one of his two biggest channels, with X. [source]

Elephas: Aayush filters Ahrefs for keyword difficulty under 20 and volume over 500, and avoids high-volume, high-competition terms while the site has low authority. If Ahrefs is too expensive, he suggests paying for one month ($129) and doing a quarter's keyword research in it. [source]

Late (Mickey): Mickey targets bottom-of-funnel keywords with 300 to 800 monthly searches, low competition and high intent, kept in a spreadsheet with volume and difficulty, and aims to rank within three to six months. Organic search brings in over $8K MRR. In the same episode, host Pat Walls argues that informational searches are dead but searches with buying intent still work. [source]

Affiliate comparison website (Alex): For a business that relies on SEO, Alex says to go after low-competition long-tail keywords with high intent and look for query patterns like 'best X for Y'. [source]

SEO lead-generation agency (Tim): Tim built his lead generation through SEO by ranking for one keyword at a time, using Google Trends for keyword research. His first SEO client came from his own blog. [source]

Elephas: The team discovered SEO by writing support articles for early customers. One on how to create OpenAI API keys, unrelated to the product, ranked number one on Google for six to eight months. [source]

Stagetimer: Lukas writes documentation pages and makes YouTube videos for super-niche keywords that people with a concrete problem search for, then doubles down on what gets clicks. About half his traffic comes from Google. [source]

Portfolio of 20 tiny apps: They wrote blog posts and tutorials on a gap nobody covered, password-protecting WooCommerce categories. The posts ranked at the top of Google straight away and brought the first sales within days; most customers still come from organic search. [source]

Data Fetcher: Andy's growth plan is content marketing around the most popular API integrations, as blog posts and YouTube videos. [source]

Super Demo: Joseph's team writes detailed comparison pages against every competitor to piggyback on their traffic and to show up in AI search. They launch imperfect version-one pages early and improve the ones that gain traction. [source]

Setter AI: The founders write blog articles comparing their software with major competitors like HubSpot. [source]

Micro-SaaS version of a $1B tool: Their early traction came from Product Hunt, Reddit, X and SEO aimed at competitor keywords like 'alternatives to X' and 'how much does X cost', with no paid channels. [source]

Mike's SaaS portfolio: SEO blog posts and competitor alternative pages are a major focus of his content marketing. [source]

Yaphone: When a big competitor shuts down, the articles that mention it stay up. Denis found posts ranking for 'Skype alternative', contacted the authors by X, LinkedIn or email, and asked them to mention Yaphone. [source]

AI resume builder (Colin): Colin calls Reddit SEO a big hack: his Reddit resume guide is the first Google result for 'resume advice Reddit', and it links to his product without making it the main call to action. [source]

Postiz: Being open source gets Postiz into blog posts, reviews and directory listings on high-domain-authority sites, which Nevo counts as SEO. [source]

Mike's SaaS portfolio: He asks his lifetime-deal customers to write honest reviews on Trustpilot and G2 to boost the domain's ranking. [source]

Late (Mickey): Mickey makes the same content for organic and paid search. If a page does not rank, he runs ads on it, and he uses data from both to refine landing pages. He calls ads immediate feedback and SEO the part that compounds. [source]

Three cloned apps: Samuel starts with Google and Meta ads to validate fast, then moves to SEO once there is traction, because it is almost free and compounds. [source]

One-website business: Google search ads brought the first users but never turned a profit: $1,000 in ads brought about $300 in sales. He cut them, and today basically all his customers come from organic Google search. [source]

Four-SaaS portfolio: Tibo uses organic social and Product Hunt to reach $1K to $10K MRR, then shifts to SEO, ads and affiliates past $20K MRR. Once a channel works he doubles down, for SEO by finding new keywords. [source]

AI video app: He validates ideas with SEO tools like Ahrefs, looking for keywords with high search volume and low difficulty. [source]

Three cloned apps: He checks competitors' traffic sources in Ahrefs. If they grow with both ads and SEO, he reads it as a strong demand signal that is easier to copy. [source]

Stoppr: To validate the niche, the founder searched keywords like 'stop sugar' on Google Trends to check the trend was rising, then looked for influencer content on the topic on TikTok and Instagram. [source]

Setter AI: Before writing code, the founders put a landing page on a domain they already owned, optimized for 'cold call automation', with a mock product demo and a book-a-demo button. It ranked on Google and got a billion-dollar company to book a call. [source]

Yaphone: Denis warns that a mistake as small as a missing 'www' in the sitemap can make Google ignore every page you want to rank. He says SEO changes take weeks or months to show but pay off immensely. [source]

Setter AI: To get a new landing page ranking, the founders request indexing in Google Search Console within 24 hours. [source]

Automation micro-SaaS (Demitro): He uses Google Search Console to analyse keywords, click-through rates and positions, and Google Keyword Planner to estimate volumes before writing. [source]

Elephas: The team tracks the site in Google Search Console and runs every blog post through Neuron Writer as a pre-publish check. [source]

Three cloned apps: Once an app has traction, Samuel automates article creation with tools like Outrank to build compounding search traffic. [source]

20-app portfolio: He uses AI to generate SEO content, emails and ads, and puts SEO first while the product is still getting good. One of his apps is itself an AI SEO agent making about $100K a month. [source]

Goji Berry AI: Roman pays about $99 a month for Outrank for SEO, alongside Reddit, cold email and LinkedIn outreach. [source]

Postiz: Nevo uses Outranking for SEO articles. [source]

BulkMockup (Vikash): Vikash puts the keyword in the title, the description and the first 30 seconds of the video. About 22% of his channel's views come from Google search, and he says videos can rank there without the authority and backlinks a blog post needs. [source]

Automation micro-SaaS (Demitro): He calls YouTube a hack for Google: tutorial videos can rank high in search results for some keywords, and customers have come from a tutorial on cold emails. [source]

AI SEO writing SaaS (Vasco): YouTube is his only growth channel, and the videos also rank on Google and get recommended by LLMs. About 20% of traffic comes from Google search. [source]

Super Demo: For top-of-funnel searches, the team built thousands of programmatic pages for software how-to keywords like 'how to export Figma to PDF', each with an interactive demo embedded front and centre. [source]

Angel Match and Investor Hunt: Programmatic SEO brings in about half of Rashid's revenue. His advice: build a database that solves a particular problem, then use programmatic pages to get traffic to it. [source]

Subscribr: Programmatic SEO brings in over 30,000 views a month from Google. [source]

Super Demo: Roughly 30 to 40% of visitors come from SEO and LLMs combined. The team launches pages early and optimizes the ones that gain traction in search engines and LLMs. [source]

Pinterest pin SaaS (Nick): ChatGPT and other LLMs recommending his product is one of Nick's top three channels, which he treats as similar to SEO. [source]

AI SEO writing SaaS (Vasco): His YouTube videos get recommended in LLMs as well as ranking on Google. [source]