people underestimate SEO...

It is evergreen... passive... digital real estate.

it can do magic... if you are consistent.

Especially now with AI you can 2X your traffic growth and automate 85% of the work.

For the past 6 months... we've been building an online directory.

we just reached $2540 MRR... with SEO only... from a complete zero.

I did share this on other subreddits. Maybe this gives ideas to someone.

+ This can be easily replicated if you have a website lol

Current metrics:

• $2540 MRR - businesses pay us to list on the directory + display ads + pay to be featured.
• 43k monthly visitors - in the past couple of weeks our SEO growth is a hockey stick.
• DR (Domain Rating) 35 - it took us 2.5 months to get to that.
• 51 okay-ish quality referring domains (90% of them are do-follow) and 1.6k backlinks.

There are probably 3 main pillars I try to focus on:

1. keywords --> which then is the basis for ALL the content pieces we do blogs, landing pages, about us pages, competitor comparisons etc --> we use a DIY excel file to automate content production at scale.
2. backlinks --> boost DR --> one of the main things to boost ranking on google.
3. website health --> this is technical stuff like internal and external linking, schemas, canonical tags, alt texts, load speeds, compressed images, meta descriptions, titles etc --> do this once... and do it GOOD.

$0.07 per SEO optimised blog at scale with AI

Yep... we've literally built our own SEO blog tool... and it is a Spreadsheet with bunch of app scripts :D

NOTE that we add a little bit of human touch to those blogs that are picked up by Google rank top in 25

How it works... is that we paste in bunch of links (other websites, blogs, news articles) and with a click of a button we can get up to 2000 SEO optimised content pieces... from an Excel file... $0.07 per blog.

The spreadsheet is integrated with Chat gpt (obviously). We use GPT-4 for meta descriptions, titles, transforming the content from text to html code since it is more powerful, and GPT-4o for content itself because it is cheaper and faster for "general text".

The spreadsheet repurposes content. The spreadsheet generates:

• Meta descriptions and titles
• FAQs sections - DON'T skip FAQ sections! They are a must for SEO. On Ahrefs... there is a section of questions people are searching about your keyword... that's your FAQs
• It can find contextual youtube videos (links to those videos) - to show google that our content is not "just text" thus higher quality.
• Screenshots and images of the original source (the website link we inputed)

I then download a csv version of the excel and import it into our Webflow. The csv file column names match our webflow CMS field names.

tbh... we didn't even know that it can be done with a spreadsheet. We "tried" building it because every other tool we were using is (1) expensive from $0.59 per SEO content piece (2) they didn't provide the scale we wanted (3) we wanted more control over the output.

Focus on DR 35+ backlinks... easier

We bought backlinks only once... rest of the backlinks was a manual work from us.

• Bunch of free listing databases (about 65% of our backlinks)
• You can comment on open forums with your link to get a backlink (be careful tho)
• Post a blog on Medium com --> DR 94 backlink (takes time to Index)
• If you pay for Notion you can get a DR 94 backlink from Notion
• If you use Beehiiv you can get a DR 86 backlink from Beehiiv
• Google product stacking (Google sites, Google notes etc) --> backlink from almighty Google itself

A lot of work goes into backlinks because they are THAT important. I have tried bunch of "black hat" strategies as well... but note that all of these strategies won't work if you don't index the primary source from where your backlink is coming from.

BIG search volume and low KD

Key things I'm looking for in keywords:

I use Ahrefs Keyword research tool... it is literally free

• BIG search volume - 2k+ is oaky-ish for a single keyword
• EASY to rank - KD (keyword difficulty) below 15
• Look for long tail keywords (these are golden nuggets since they have a VERY clear search intent) - "how to edit..." "how to change..." "how to delete..." "how to paint..." I hope you got the idea.
  • on Ahrefs you can use "*" to get BIG volume long tail keywords... like this "my keyword*". Ahrefs then populates the "*" with the tail.
• Check SERP (Search Engine Result Page) for your keywords - it shows current top 10 pages for those KWs. Check their content. Can you improve it? Have they missed anything?
• Keyword gap from your competitors - shows EASY keywords that your competitors have missed and also shows what keywords overlap with you.

Also one cool thing... if you don't type any keywords on Ahrefs and press "Enter"... you can browse all the keywords out there... it is magical.

Once we have the keywords, we run our spreadsheet.

And that's pretty much it.

I hope that you can get some ideas from this little silly project.

Also... if you have any questions about this...

I might share the SEO blog automation excel file/help if people are interested...