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Comment by encoderer | Hacker News Reader

A few thoughts from our experience growing Cronitor as a side project:

1. Hacker News has provided exposure but not a lot of direct business. Sometimes people find us on other channels but recognize us from HN. I would say, don't worry too much if you never front page here.

2. Working on SEO consistently over the years has been our most valuable source of high quality traffic.

3. Work with influencers in your industry. When a popular AWS blogger wrote about Cronitor and was tweeted by their AWS community lead Jeff Barr we added 8 subscribers that day that are still with us.

4. Re-marketing to sign-ups that didn't convert. Every month our product noticeably gets better in some way, and those early sign-ups to our free plan that didn't subscribe have been an invaluable source of later conversion.

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What did you do for SEO? I can see you only have few blog entries...

Blog posts are content marketing, not about SEO, especially since we use Medium and aren't hosting a blog on our primary domain. There is plenty written about content-farm SEO strategies if anybody is looking for that.

One thing I'll say, if you're talking about a SaaS app and not something on the battlefield of big-time consumer SEO (which I also have some experience with as an engineer), it starts with crafting your website copy to address both prospective users and Googlebot. Iterate on it and continue improving. The text on your page matters.

Here are a few technical tips:

1. Many engineers do things like add ajax endpoints to robots.txt. Don't do this. Google can read many dynamic pages but not if you block them from loading the ajax requests.

2. That, and other issues, are uncovered by using the google webmaster tools. They will rank issues that are affecting your crawl.

3. In my experience, server rendered content still out-performs client rendered content. Server-render if SEO is a priority.

4. Duplicate content causes SEO problems and can be subtle. You can have an SRP like /catalog/results that can also be accessed when using your next-page/prev-page links as /catalog/results/1. That is a duplicate page.

Generally, though, I don't feel qualified to give much SEO advice without my own survivorship bias. Also, I would like to be doing so much better than we are, and continue to work for it.

So your SEO strategy was(is) website copy? Anything else, like "link building" or sth else?

Or if you want to answer in another way, how many hours a week/month/year does that SEO work take, before one sees the results you are talking about?

edit. you expanded your answer while I was typing. it seems you are mostly talking about on page and technical SEO, which doesn't sound like it takes that much time.

I think the best long-term reliable link building strategy is to build a good a product that is well liked and discussed by people organically.

Take something like a website widget that you build with useful and free content people can add to their Wordpress or whatever. Seems like the kind of SEO strategy a software developer can get behind. Then, a year later, turns out somebody used it for some "content" on 200,000 generated wordpress pages as part of their own scheme. Now you're penalized for this with a manual action from Google.

I guess my point is: to go this route means investing real time editing, curating and disavowing. I find it more profitable to focus energy on improving the product while Google and our users both notice.

No the OP was paying attention to the on site technical SEO that can kill a site if you screw things up badly refines and correctly optimised browse structures can make a huge difference.

For SEO, what tools were you using to assess changes you needed to make?

I came across that Medium vs Self Hosted problem a while ago. For SEO self hosted is better, but sharing and discovery is better through Medium.

My questions are - What made you chose Medium as a domain (and would you chose it again?) and do you get a reasonable amount of traffic, with an appreciable conversion rate through Medium?

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