SEO Strategies I Used to Gain 2,000 Users In Two Months
Tags: seo, startup, saas, javascript
Published: 2022-10-17 08:26:08

_Disclaimer: This article was originally posted on the [Web Highlights blog](https://web-highlights.com/blog/seo-strategies-i-used-to-gain-2-000-users-in-two-months/). You can find it here._

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I was unmotivated and somewhat disappointed when I read an article on [Medium.com](https://medium.com/@mariusbongarts) that gave the foundation for the growth of my [Web Highlights Chrome Extension](https://web-highlights.com) today.

> Growth is the lifeblood of startups, and it’s what differentiates Snapchat from the coffee house on the corner– it’s exponential. — Des Traynor

Two months ago, Web Highlights had 3,577 active users in the Chrome Web Store. Suppose you also have a published side project or write articles. You will surely be familiar with the daily addiction to view the statistics of your articles or projects. Of course, I am doing the same, and at the beginning of August, I was a bit disappointed as user growth stagnated.


![New users per day — December 2019 until today](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ccb85hwd9dgeyldjr5x0.png)

The chart above shows that at the beginning of 2022, the user growth per day started to decline. That demotivated me, mainly because there were even days when I lost users. Meaning more users have uninstalled the extension than installing it.

But, since June 2022, you can see an increase in user growth per day and a peek of 81 new users on September 13th.
In the last two months, the amount of new users has doubled from around 15 per day to more than 30. How did I do that?

## Product Marketing
One of the biggest problems developers have with side projects is that many can develop great products but often don’t know how to market them — Here is one of them 👋

You can build the greatest product in the world, but if no one hears or knows about it, it’s doomed to fail.

> The only difference between product teams and marketing teams at a startup is that one is focused on long term growth, and the other is focused on immediately measurable growth. — Intercom on Starting Up by Des Traynor

When I started developing the Web Highlights Chrome extension, I never cared about Marketing or SEO. I always focused on building a product that helps students, researchers, and everyone else to organize their internet research in a better-organized way.

Web Highlights is still far from perfect, but it can keep up with all my competitors. Many users would say that my web highlighter extension is much better, and the Chrome Web Store reviews agree. But that’s  not the point here — The fact is that my extension currently has around 6,000 active users. Some of my competitors have more than 700,000 users.

_So, what differentiates my extension from a similar highlighter extension with close to a billion users?_

The answer is — **Marketing and SEO**.

I read [this article](https://medium.com/geekculture/what-i-have-learned-from-2-years-of-building-software-side-hustles-eb634acadeb5) here on Medium from [George Field](https://medium.com/@george.af.field) two months ago. I left a private note and asked whether he had some tips on how to scale and market my extension. George took a lot of time to give me very insightful tips, and we had a call for about one hour. At this point, thank you again, George. I find it amazing that strangers worldwide take so much time to help others.

Here are the points I took away from our conversation that are the reason for the increase in user growth over the last two months.

## Hosting a Blog on your Website
If I had to settle, I would say that hosting a blog on Web Highlights was the essential point for new user growth.

Without organic keywords on your website, SEO is not possible. Keywords tell search engines what your page is about so they can show relevant content to the searcher. Having organic keywords on your website is key to getting more organic traffic.

Organic traffic is also why I publish this article on Medium and my Web Highlights Blog. Before I hosted the blog, there were only a few keywords on my site. My landing page contained a few sentences that offered a small number of keywords. By that, the page was at least visible in Google Search at all.

[Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/) is an excellent tool for analyzing the organic traffic of your page. It takes all the keywords for which your page ranks in the top 100 organic search results. Then it calculates an organic traffic value, which estimates how much organic search traffic your target website gets each month.

![Ahrefs organic traffic — last 90 days](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/p8a713qfop9oylfld61a.png)

The screenshot above shows how Web Highlights’ organic traffic and organic keywords developed in the last 90 days. You can see that hosting a blog has had an incredible impact.

In just two months, the organic traffic increased from 20 to 212. Notice that the organic traffic per month value is only an estimation. It would be best to use the Google Search Console to see the traffic.

![Google Search Console — web-highlights.com](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qn3esb8be9pud8pifz3p.png)

The chart above shows a screenshot of the Google Search Console tool. Here we can see how much traffic is really coming from organic search traffic in the last 28 days. With 463 clicks in 28 days, Web Highlights generates even more organic clicks than Ahref estimated.

Ahrefs can also group keywords by top positions. It differentiates between three keyword groups:

- low-ranked (11+)

- middle-ranked (4–10)

- high-ranked (1–3)

This means that if Web Highlights has a high-ranked keyword like “web-highlighter,” it will appear in the first three search results.

Here is a chart that demonstrates even better which impact the blog hosting had:

![Organic keywords by top position](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/hn1zv4oqu113t4dq5cfu.png)

Before publishing the blog, Web Highlights had around 30 low-ranked, one middle-ranked, and no high-ranked keywords.

Today, there are 140 low-ranked, 30 middle-ranked, and even one high-ranked keyword.

## Creating Backlinks
Once you have your website equipped with some keywords, you should focus on another essential metric — backlinks.

A backlink is just an anchor link from a different site to your site. Backlinks are one of the most important factors in improving your site’s SEO ranking.

> Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent another website’s traffic coming to your own site. — mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/backlinks/

**Do-follow and No-follow backlinks**

Backlinks are not all the same. We need to understand that there are two different types of backlinks:

- Do-Follow links: Anchor links without rel="no-follow" attribute.

- No-Follow links: Anchor links with a rel="no-follow" attribute.

Do-Follow link:

`<a href="https://web-highlights.com">blue text</a>`

No-Follow link:

`<a href="https://web-highlights.com" rel="nofollow">Web Highlights</a>`

No-follow links are the ones you should focus on. But they are much harder to get. On platforms like Medium, Quora, etc., where anyone can publish content, links are no-follow automatically. These links will not be crawled by Google and will not have much effect on your Google rank. Nevertheless, no-follow links are also valuable as they bring traffic to your site.

But what brings the most significant effect are do-follow links. Those links allow Google and other search engines to point back to your website. Every do-follow link strengthens your domain authority.

> Getting a do-follow backlink to your story or to your root domain is the №1 factor for getting ranked on Google search. — Aamir Kamal 🚀

**Domain Authority**

Each backlink from another website will make your website rank higher. Especially do-follow links will have a great impact on your SEO score.

You should focus on creating as many backlinks to your website as possible. But, what’s also very important is that you should not only focus on quantity but also the quality of your backlinks domains.

The higher the domain authority of the linking page is, the better it will affect your page’s authority.

> The domain authority of a website says how important this website is for its subject and how likely it is to achieve good rankings. — en.ryte.com

The scale goes from 0 to 100, and you can check the domain authority using a tool like this. E.g., a backlink from a domain like medium.com (domain-authority = 95) will have much more impact than a backlink from a low-ranked website.

> Medium is one of the websites with one of the highest domain authority. — Aamir Kamal 🚀

One of the things I did was to ensure that every single Medium article of mine has at least one backlink to web-highlights.com. Even though Medium links within articles are no-follow links, they still positively impact SEO as they bring more traffic to my website.

> A no-follow backlink from Medium still has some SEO value. — Aamir Kamal

Furthermore, I linked Web Highlights by writing answers on quora.com and reaching out to authors of online highlighter comparison articles.

Once again, Ahrefs can help us with this. We can easily see the backlinks and referring domains increase in the last months.

![Ahrefs — Number of backlinks](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1igdwal9lo0za9no57eb.png)

Furthermore, Ahrefs enables us to analyze the domain authority of each linking website.


![Referring domains](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xmjimyzy1v2z484ohko2.png)

You can see that medium.com is the linking domain with the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, it does not include a do-follow link, as most linking domains do.

Still, e.g., launching my product on Producthunt was essential to provide seven do-follow links for my highlighter extension from a page with very high domain authority.

## Improve Website Structure

Another significant thing to do is to improve your website. You want to ensure that your website has good performance, accessibility, best practices, and, especially, SEO score.

Achieving this is relatively easy with Google’s Lighthouse tool, which is included in the Chrome Developer tools. Alternatively, you can download the Lighthouse Chrome Extension.

![Lighthouse report — web-highlights.com](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/zqfn1t5qe7qve9nlsorc.png)

You can run a report telling you what to do to improve your score. For example, you want to ensure that all images contain an accessible alt attribute. This enables search engines to access your images as well. But, most importantly, it makes your website accessible for people with disabilities by using tools like screen readers.

> Perhaps the most important reason to use the alt tag is to support accessibility — MDN

Fulfilling all accessibility for your website will bring many benefits for everyone, and as a side effect, you will be ranked higher by Google.


## Final Thoughts

Many great software products out there go under because many developers build great products but don’t know how to make them accessible to the masses.

If Google can not find your product, it basically does not exist. It is not difficult to take the first small steps to become visible to search engines. The first step is to publish a lot of content on your page. An own blog can be a huge step. It would help if you also tried to link your site to as many websites as possible and implement standard SEO conventions on your website.

I am always happy to answer questions and am open to criticism. Feel free to contact me at any time! Get in touch with me via [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marius-bongarts-6b3638171/) or follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MariusBongarts).

Join 5000+ users and start using the [Web Highlights PDF & Web Highlighter](https://web-highlights.com/) to highlight text on the internet.