Ask HN: I have 2 weeks to get SEO traffic or I'm fired. Here's what I've tried
I'm in a tough spot and could really use some advice from people who have been in the trenches.
I'm a recent grad from Morocco, and after a year of searching, I landed my first job three months ago as a junior SEO person for a small startup. Today, my boss told me my results have been nonexistent and gave me a two-week deadline to show a significant traffic spike, or I'm out.
I'm trying not to panic. I've spent the last three months trying to do everything right, but the traffic analytics are flat. I feel like I'm failing, and I'm hoping this community can point out what I'm missing.
Here's a breakdown of what I've done so far:
Technical Audit: I went through the entire site (lartist.ai), fixed all the 404s and broken internal links I could find, generated and submitted a clean XML sitemap, and made sure our robots.txt wasn't blocking anything important.
On-Page SEO: I rewrote the title tags and meta descriptions for all our core pages to be more descriptive and target what I thought were the right keywords. I've also been writing blog content – guides on how to make AI art, how to write better prompts, etc..
Off-Page SEO: This is where I've hit a wall. I've submitted our site to about 40 different AI and SaaS directories. I also sent over 50 personalized emails to design and marketing blogs to pitch guest posts, but I've had zero replies. I suspect my outreach is naive and getting ignored.
My theory is that three months is just too short for SEO in a competitive space, but I don't have the luxury of time. My boss needs to see a spike in the graph.
The product itself is an AI image generator called Lartist.ai. The whole idea is that it's built for creators and marketers, not engineers—you don't need complex, technical prompts to get good results.
I'm not looking for a magic bullet, but I'm at the point where any advice or feedback would be invaluable. My Hail Mary ask for this community is: could you take a look at the site? Maybe try generating an image (there are 20 free credits for new users).
The traffic would be a literal lifeline for me right now, and any candid feedback on the product or my failed strategy could give me something to work with to save my job.
Thank you for your time. This job means a lot to me.