I spent months doing SEO the way every beginner does: stuffing keywords, building random backlinks, and wondering why nothing moved. Then I changed my approach entirely. Here is what actually drove organic traffic to my projects — with no SEO agency, no budget, and no tricks.
The Indie Hacker SEO Problem
Most SEO advice is written for companies with dedicated marketing teams and content budgets. As an indie hacker, you are the developer, the writer, the marketer, and the customer support team. You need to be ruthlessly efficient.
The good news: SEO fundamentally rewards genuine expertise and useful content. Both of those are things indie hackers actually have.
The One Thing That Moved My Traffic
Before the tactics: the single biggest unlock for me was committing to publishing consistently over 6+ months. Not viral posts, not keyword tricks. Just showing up.
Google’s trust signals are time-weighted. A site that publishes regularly, gets some links, and has low bounce rates will outrank a better-written site that has not been updated in 8 months. Consistency compounds.
Technical SEO: The Boring Baseline
You need to get this right once, then forget about it. These are the non-negotiables:
Fast page loads
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. The most impactful things:
- Serve images in WebP or AVIF format
- Use a CDN (Cloudflare is free and excellent)
- Minimise render-blocking JavaScript
Run your site through PageSpeed Insights and fix anything in the red. Aim for 90+ on mobile.
Sitemap and indexing
If you are on Astro (like this site), @astrojs/sitemap generates your sitemap automatically. Submit it to Google Search Console:
https://search.google.com/search-consoleCheck Search Console weekly for crawl errors and indexing issues. It is free and it will surface problems you would never notice otherwise.
Clean URL structure
Each page should have one canonical URL. No trailing slash inconsistencies, no duplicate content across www and non-www. This sounds trivial but it costs rankings.
Content Strategy: The Part That Actually Matters
Write for search intent, not search volume
Beginners target high-volume keywords (e.g., “JavaScript framework”). They get no traffic because they cannot compete with MDN, freeCodeCamp, and Vercel.
Instead, target specific, lower-volume queries that you can actually rank for:
| Instead of… | Try… |
|---|---|
| ”React tutorial" | "React useEffect cleanup explained" |
| "startup advice" | "how to validate a SaaS idea without building it" |
| "productivity tips" | "keyboard-first workflow for developers” |
These longer, more specific queries convert better and are far easier to rank for.
Programmatic SEO for tools
If you are building a tool, you can generate hundreds of useful pages automatically. My best-performing pages often follow a pattern like:
- “[Tool] alternative to [Competitor]”
- “[Tool] for [specific use case]”
- “How to [specific task] with [Tool]”
Each page targets a different long-tail keyword, costs you almost nothing to create (beyond the template), and compounds over time.
Update old content
A post from 2023 about React will lose rankings to a freshly-updated 2026 version of the same topic. Set a reminder every 6 months to update your top 10 posts. Add new sections, update outdated information, and change the dateAdded to signal freshness to Google.
Backlinks: The Part Everyone Gets Wrong
Backlinks are still the strongest ranking signal. But most link-building tactics waste time.
What actually worked for me:
Write things worth linking to
Contrarian takes, original research, detailed tutorials, personal case studies — these attract links naturally. Generic “10 tips for productivity” posts do not.
Build in public
Tweet, post on LinkedIn, or write on Hacker News about what you are building. When your tool or story resonates, people link to it. I got my first significant backlinks this way — not from outreach, but from people discovering the content.
Contribute to developer communities
Writing detailed answers on Stack Overflow, contributing to open source projects, and being active in niche communities (Discord servers, subreddits, Slack groups) all create low-level link signals and brand awareness that compound.
HARO and journalist requests
Help a Reporter Out sends you daily emails from journalists needing expert sources. If you contribute a quote about software development, startups, or tech, you often get a backlink from a high-authority publication. It costs only time.
The Metric That Matters Most
Forget about domain authority scores. The one number I track: organic clicks in Google Search Console, month over month.
If it is growing, the strategy is working. If it flatlines, I look at which pages are getting impressions but low clicks (a title/meta description problem) and which pages get clicks but high bounce rates (a content quality problem).
These two diagnostics cover 90% of SEO issues.
What Does Not Work (That Everyone Recommends)
- Buying backlinks — Google is much better at detecting these than it used to be. Not worth the risk.
- Keyword stuffing — actively hurts readability and rankings now.
- Social media for SEO — social signals are not a direct ranking factor. Social drives awareness which can lead to links, but it is an indirect path.
- Optimising for Domain Authority — DA is a third-party metric, not a Google signal. Ranking for the right keywords matters more.
The Realistic Timeline
The hardest part of SEO is the delay between effort and reward. Here is what a realistic timeline looks like:
- Month 1-2: Publish, fix technical basics, submit sitemap. See almost nothing.
- Month 3-4: A few posts start getting impressions. Traffic is single digits.
- Month 5-6: Some posts break into the top 10. Traffic starts growing.
- Month 7-12: Compounding begins. New posts rank faster. Backlinks trickle in.
If you are expecting results in 30 days, you will quit before the strategy works.
Conclusion
SEO for indie hackers is not complicated, but it requires patience most people do not have. Write genuinely useful content targeting specific queries, get the technical basics right once, and build links by doing things worth linking to. Then show up consistently for at least six months.
That is the whole playbook.