My 1-Year SEO Journey: Lessons Learning Non-Technical SEO

Overall SEO growth

As a founder, non-technical SEO was a new challenge for me. This post is my honest buildinpublic 1-year summary since getting serious about it. I'll share what worked, what didn't, and what you should focus on for your sites.

Content Marketing: A Mixed Bag

Blog posts statistics

My first step was integrating headless WordPress into my NextJS site and jumping into regular blogging. We published 90 posts this year, a mix of:

  • New product updates
  • Relevant articles
  • Case studies
  • Tutorials

Most posts were AI-written with varying levels of human editing. Quality varies in my opinion. The results? Mixed at best.

What We Learned

  • We get some traffic to the blog, with occasional spikes for timely articles (e.g., OpenAI announcements).
  • Growth is stagnant despite our efforts.
  • Most traffic goes to a small subset of posts on highly technical/niche AI topics.
  • These visitors likely aren't our ideal customers.

My Take: Content marketing feels like a waste of time unless your product is super niche with low-competition keywords. The effort-to-reward ratio just isn't there for most businesses.

Documentation: The Hidden SEO Goldmine

Documentation SEO impact

Documentation turned out to be one of our easiest SEO wins. Here's why:

  1. You have to write them anyway for your customers.
  2. They're great for SEO.
  3. Our DocsBot support chatbot crawls them daily, training itself to respond to customer questions.

Our Strategy

  • We regularly analyze which docs are ranking well.
  • We then optimize them further for keywords and add CTAs.
  • We use a dual approach for titles:
    • H1 headers are customer-focused
    • Meta titles are optimized for search clicks for potential customers

Pro Tip: Don't neglect your documentation. It's a multi-purpose asset that can drive traffic, improve user experience, and even be a source to train an AI support bot.

Alternative Pages: Comparing Yourself to Competitors

Alternative pages comparison

Creating "alternative" pages comparing your product to competitors is table stakes for any SaaS company. Here's our approach:

  1. We keep adding more competitor comparisons.
  2. We use a consistent template but customize all content sections with the help of AI.
  3. Each page features a comprehensive comparison table. This takes a lot of manual work to research, but it's worth it. And if you forget to keep it updated, it's not technically lying, right?

Benefits

  • While they can be hard to rank organically, they're excellent landing pages for Google PPC ads.
  • They train our AI retention agent to respond when someone is considering canceling to switch to a competitor.

Hack: Create an alternative page for your own product to capture users looking to switch away from you. Try to outrank your competitors' comparison pages, or even target it with PPC!

Programmatic SEO: Scaling Content Creation

Programmatic SEO results

We experimented with programmatic SEO using:

  • A custom script
  • Content template
  • Unsplash API for images
  • GPT-4 for writing with structured output json

The result? 300 landing pages for various industries. The hardest part was reviewing the output from the AI and making sure it was not hallucinating features or functionality that we don't have. Took a lot of context, prompt tuning, and reviewing to get good outputs.

Outcomes

  • Indexing took time (tip: launch gradually)
  • Most traffic goes to low-intent pages (e.g., "astrology chatbots")
  • 1.7k clicks isn't bad for the effort involved

Next Steps: We plan to identify top-performing pages and add demo chatbots to enhance user engagement.

Free Tools: The Tip I'm Scared to Share

Free tools SEO impact

Intent is everything in modern SEO. Our biggest win came from creating free tools for searchers that:

  1. Can't be instantly answered by AI (e.g., advanced calculators, checkers, converters)
  2. Give users exactly what they want with no friction (e.g., no signup required)

This approach has been a game-changer for our SEO strategy. Here's why it works so well:

  • High-Intent Traffic: We hit on several high-traffic, high-intent keywords, causing our traffic to explode.
  • Developer-Friendly: As a developer, I can create multiple mini-products in a day, especially with AI coding tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
  • Quick Indexing: These tools are typically indexed within a week or two.
  • Backlink Magnet: Useful tools naturally attract backlinks, more so than content. This potentially increases our Domain Authority (DA), helping other pages rank higher.
  • Listing Sites: Launching these tools on Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, etc. can generate additional backlinks from listing sites.

However, there's always room for improvement:

  • Some tools have low search volumes or need keyword optimization.
  • I should focus more on keyword research before building the tools, whoops.
  • We need to test new strategies to better convert these leads beyond a custom CTA. Example: Add to email series in exchange for more usage credits.

Looking Ahead

SEO is an ever-evolving field, and what works today might not work tomorrow. However, focusing on user intent, providing genuine value, and leveraging your unique strengths (like development skills for free tools) can set you apart. That's what a year of hard SEO work at DocsBot has taught me anyway!

Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Stay consistent, keep experimenting, and always prioritize providing value to your users.

P.S. If you're interested in training an AI chatbot for your business to handle customer support, team knowledge access, customer retention, RFP completion, custom copywriting, research, and more, check out DocsBot AI.