The 3 Step SEO Process for SaaS Products with Stefan Wirth

Ben: Stefan is the founder of Swiftbrief, an SEO tool built specifically for SaaS companies. After spending the last 6 months deeply focused on SEO, he's developed both practical expertise and an innovative tool to help others succeed with search engine optimization. What makes Stefan's perspective particularly valuable is that he comes from the indie hacker world himself - he knows the unique challenges that solo founders and small teams face when trying to build sustainable traffic channels.

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How did you get interested in SEO?

I've always been fascinated by how you can build a sustainable traffic channel without consistently spending money. While there are other ways to do this, like building an audience or newsletter, these are often tied to a specific person or personal brand. SEO is different because it taps into existing market demand - people self-select themselves through their searches.

For a long time, SEO seemed like a black box to me. It wasn't until the last 6 months, when I focused intensively on it, that I started to really understand it. What I discovered is that once you master the fundamentals, it's not as complex as it seems. There's a lot of artificial noise created by agencies and people selling products or services - 500 gurus all saying different things, promising some "secret" that will solve everything.

For Swiftbrief, I actually partnered with experienced SEO agency owners, so I didn't have to learn everything myself. But I wanted to understand it deeply anyway.

What should people expect when using SEO for their indie products?

The timeline really depends on your niche, as that determines your competition.

Many indies building SaaS will see longer timelines of 3-6 months, but it's possible to see results in under 28 days.

What are the biggest mistakes people make when starting out?

There are a couple common ones.

First, many try writing a few articles without any strategy behind them and then give up when they don't see results.

Others follow the classic "high volume" and "low KD" advice and produce content that isn't relevant to their business, so it doesn't convert.

Both approaches will leave you disappointed and thinking "SEO doesn't work." But plenty of people make SEO work - the hard truth is that if it's not working, you're probably the problem.

How should builders approach keyword research for niche products?

First, you need to understand your user - what are they looking for and what problem are you solving? This isn't even SEO yet, but it's key.

Then try to figure out how they would phrase their searches - what words do they use? This is much easier if you know your user well.

Use that as your starting point for keyword suggestions.

Simply put it into Google and see what autocomplete gives you - that provides more ways to branch out. If you want to get fancy and have the budget, you can use a keyword research tool that will do a lot of heavy lifting. I use Swiftbrief for this, but there are plenty of others - it's a very crowded market!

If you're using a tool, you can also start by analyzing a competitor to see what they rank for. This can give you initial ideas (Ahrefs is probably best for this currently).

What role does AI play in SEO in 2024?

AI plays a big role, most often in the form of mass-produced content that doesn't really serve users well. This is probably where most indie hackers will start, either because they think the AI tools know more than they do, or because they see it as a quick growth hack.

Unfortunately, most indies don't want to put in the work it takes to succeed.

👉 AI is best used for the heavy lifting of research, keyword clustering (grouping similar keywords together), and creating draft articles that you can edit and add your own voice to.

Another factor is that AI is increasingly able to snatch top-of-funnel keywords that might just be answered directly by Google.

You should hedge against this by including tools or e-commerce offerings in your content strategy. This actually makes it even harder to win with generic AI content - you have to be so good that someone will pick you over the auto-generated answer.

How do you create content that both ranks well and serves user intent for bottom-of-funnel product pages?

First, you need to find the keywords people use when referring to your tool or bottom-of-funnel page. For example: "maid of honor speech generator" (one of our assets ranks for this).

Then put yourself in the user's shoes - what are they looking for?

Usually it's features, testimonials, use cases, and answers to common questions in FAQs.

That's the user side. Then you need to make sure you cover all the relevant keywords on the page for your main keyword. I use Swiftbrief for this too, as you can build out solution pages that ensure you include the right keywords without much hassle.

Think of it this way: Your primary focus should be pleasing the user (searcher) and your secondary focus is presenting it in a way that pleases Google. Not the other way around.

What's your approach to link building?

It's a necessary evil because we need to show Google we have authority.

For indies, the lowest-hanging fruit are tool directories and launching on Product Hunt (I know it's dead from a traffic perspective but still has a 90+ DR).

After that, focus on creating good content that naturally attracts links, social mentions, and share your content with people likely to find it useful and link to you. If you want to get serious, consider investing in something like LinkDR (not affiliated, but it's a cool indie product).

The most important thing is giving people a reason to link to you - either you have a killer product and content, or you need to pay. Make sure your product/content is relevant to them, as you only want relevant links anyway.

And avoid paying scammy agencies to build low-quality links - it's tempting but not worth it.

How should indie hackers track SEO performance?

I use Google Search Console (GSC) right now, but we're building tracking into Swiftbrief because we want to have the whole process in one place to ideate, create, and refine content.

If you stick with GSC, make sure to mostly ignore average positions and look for outliers that you can push onto the first page with a little work. This becomes most of your ongoing work after the initial push and informs new content creation.

Most people underestimate how much work goes into maintaining and refreshing content that gets stale or isn't properly optimized for target keywords.

Can you walk us through how you'd set up an SEO strategy for a hypothetical indie product from scratch?

I actually just built out a new domain for a Eulogy Generator which is less than 3 months old, so I can share exactly how I did it. I even made a video about it on YouTube.

The first lesson is to stick to a niche with low competition but enough volume to justify the effort (this doesn't apply to most SaaS). Finding these opportunities can be tricky, but it's worth spending time upfront to avoid paying the price later. In this case, I also got the exact match domain (.com), which is always a nice bonus.

We started by identifying keyword clusters that were low-hanging fruit and all the personas who might need a eulogy. We documented which keywords they would use and analyzed them in Swiftbrief, which uncovered new keywords and page opportunities.

We then built pillar pages (landing pages that group links) around each persona with three content types:

• Guide on how to write the eulogy

• Eulogy examples for that persona

• A bottom-of-funnel page for the Generator

For example:

• How to write a Eulogy for Grandpa

• Grandpa Eulogy Examples

• Grandpa Eulogy Generator

The pillar pages are linked from the homepage to make them easy to crawl. We created the content using Swiftbrief and had it lightly edited by our partner. We also created infographics to add depth and have images with keyword-optimized alt tags.

After two weeks, I checked Google Search Console for outliers - looking for anything we could push into the top 10 or ideally top 3. I enhanced these pages by adding depth and ensuring proper keyword optimization.

We also looked for content expansion opportunities. For instance, we found "funny eulogy generator" had significant search volume but we didn't have a landing page for it, so we created one. When we saw "grandpa eulogy" performing well, we looked into related terms like "grandpa eulogy quotes" to add more depth to our coverage.

As indies start to see traction with SEO, how would you recommend they scale the channel?

Go cluster by cluster.

Start by picking one cluster and owning it - create a bottom-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and at least one top-of-funnel page, then move on to the next cluster.

Once you have initial data, your GSC or reporting tool becomes a gold mine. What's working and what isn't? Do more of what works and optimize the underperformers, unless the ROI doesn't make sense.

You can always build free tools relevant to your product which can become new bottom-of-funnel pages and clusters. For example, if you have a video editing tool, make a "video trimmer" free tool and add at least two new pages:

• "best video trimming tools"

• "how to trim video"

Ideally, make these more specific because this is likely a competitive niche. Maybe start with something like "best video trimming tools for TikTok" or get creative - but make sure people actually care by validating with keyword research and understanding your user.

Where can people learn more from you?

You can find me on Twitter, YouTube, and through my newsletter. You can find Swiftbrief at swiftbrief.com.