15 High-Reward SEO Tactics I Used to Grow My Business to $50k+ ARR

Back in summer 2024, I was at a crossroads. I had just handed in my resignation letter at my first software engineering job after launching 2 websites without much success. The lesson was rather obvious: building a product isn’t enough, you need to solve a real pain, and only then does the real work begin with distribution.

I ended up joining another startup as a founding engineer, partly because my own projects lacked traction. But I kept studying what separated businesses that grew from those that didn't. One channel kept coming up: organic search.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fascinated me because the upside is absurd. Qualified traffic, essentially free, that compounds over time. Once it works, it's like having a sales team that works around the clock to bring you warm leads.

As I read and experimented with SEO, I realized the pain many website owners go through:

As months passed, I accumulated knowledge and piled up evidence that this was a problem worth solving. At some point it became unbearable, and I decided to quit my job to focus on building what would become BlogSEO, a SaaS that completely replaces an SEO agency.

Fast-forward to December 2025: I'm running 4 websites with growing traffic, helped multiple clients implement SEO strategies that actually rank, and grew BlogSEO to $50k+ ARR.

This post is everything I learnt in the last 16 months. No theory, just tactics I tested that actually worked. This might be the most valuable piece of content I’ve ever written. It's the guide I wish I had when I started. All the information you’ll ever need to rank on Google is here. Let’s go!

Before listing the tactics, I wanted to stress on the fact that I’ve tested this for the following types of websites: E-commerce, SaaS & Directories. It usually assumes you have a place on your website where you can write long-form content like blog posts or guides.

Lowest hanging fruit in the world. This ALWAYS works.

Go to the Google Search Console, find posts ranking positions 8-20 (page 2 territory—so close to traffic, yet invisible). Refresh them: add a new section, update outdated stats, improve the intro, include a recent example. Then update the published/modified date.

When Google recrawls, it gives freshness a boost. I've seen posts jump 10+ positions within weeks just from this.

Warning: don't just change the date without adding real value. Google can tell if the page has actually been updated, or if you just changed the date.

Google wants to know a real human wrote your content. It's part of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), their framework for evaluating content quality.

The fix is simple: add a visible author to every blog post with a byline, short bio, and links to external profiles (LinkedIn, X, personal site). Bonus points for a dedicated author page on your site that links out to these profiles.

Each time I apply this to a site that wasn't doing it, all blog posts climb 8-10 positions within 2 weeks. Easy win.

Pro tip: pair this with Person schema markup to make it explicit for crawlers (more on this below).

Getting listed on integration marketplaces is underrated for SEO. When you build an integration with another platform, you get a listing on their marketplace. That's a high-authority backlink from a relevant domain, for free.

The classic example is CRM integrations. HubSpot's App Marketplace, Salesforce AppExchange, Pipedrive Marketplace: these are DA 90+ (Domain Authority) domains linking to small SaaS startups. If your product touches sales, marketing, or customer data, this is low-hanging fruit.

I built a Framer plugin for BlogSEO. Now I have a permanent listing on framer.com/marketplace linking back to me. Same strategy applies to Webflow, WordPress plugin directories, Zapier, and any platform with a partner ecosystem.

These backlinks are ideal: highly relevant, high authority, and natural. These listings also drive actual users, not just SEO juice; they’re a dedicated acquisition channel on their own.

This one is powerful if you haven't bought your domain yet.

An exact domain match (EDM) means your domain name matches the keyword people search for. Think "cheapflights.io" ranking for "cheap flights."

Google nerfed EDM years ago after people abused it with thin content. But it still works when combined with quality content.

That's exactly why I chose BlogSEO. I knew ranking for "blog", "SEO" and “SEO Blog” keywords would be central to my business. Every article reinforces that association. Every backlink you earn naturally contains your keyword.

If you're starting something new: spend an extra hour finding a domain with your primary keyword. Future you will thank you.

Build a free tool, get backlinks forever. People love linking to useful resources. A calculator, checker, generator, or analyzer that solves a specific problem will earn links naturally, no outreach needed.

The formula is simple: find a pain point in your niche, build a simple tool that solves it, make it free, and watch it get shared and referenced.

I built a free Domain Rating checker for BlogSEO. It's a simple tool that lets anyone check their website's DR instantly. Takes seconds to use, costs me almost nothing to run, and gives people a reason to visit BlogSEO, and link to it.

You don't need to build something complex. A single-purpose tool that does one thing well often outperforms feature-packed alternatives. Weekend project, years of SEO value.

Google rewards websites that publish consistently. It signals your site is active, maintained, and worth crawling frequently. A blog that publishes daily gets crawled daily.

The compounding interests are real here. Each article is a new entry point from search queries. More articles means more keywords, which in turn means more chances to rank. Over time, your traffic snowball grows.

That's exactly why I built BlogSEO. One article published to my blogs every day, automatically, targeting diverse keywords (long-tail and pillar pages keywords). If I were to do this by hand, I would hundreds of hours every month.

Parasite SEO means publishing content on high-authority domains instead of your own site. You piggyback on their domain authority to rank faster.

Reddit is the perfect platform for this right now.

Google has been favoring Reddit heavily in search results. Search almost anything + "reddit" and you'll see Reddit threads ranking on page one. Google even signed a $60M/year deal with Reddit for data access. They clearly trust the platform.

But here's what makes Reddit even more valuable: LLMs love it.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude; they all pull heavily from Reddit to answer user queries. When someone asks an AI "what's the best tool for X," the answer often comes from Reddit discussions. If your product is mentioned positively in relevant threads, you're getting recommended by AI assistants.

The key is adding genuine value. Reddit users hate obvious self-promotion. Answer questions thoroughly, be helpful, and mention your product only when it's actually relevant.

I’m building Redditor AI to help SMBs handle Reddit Marketing on autopilot. Launching in late January / early February.

Most SEO advice tells you to study what your competitors are doing. Copy their content, target their keywords, reverse-engineer their strategy. But the real opportunity lies in what they're not doing.

Keyword gap analysis means finding terms your competitors aren't targeting - or aren't targeting well. One overlooked keyword with decent search volume can become your traffic goldmine.

These gaps exist for many reasons: competitors focused elsewhere, new trends they haven't noticed, long-tail variations they ignored, or simply keywords they deemed too small to bother with.

The upside is asymmetric. While they fight over the obvious high-competition terms, you rank #1 for a keyword nobody else optimized for. That single gap can bring hundreds of monthly visitors with almost no effort.

Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or even free alternatives can show you exactly which keywords your competitors rank for, and which they don't. Look for relevant terms with decent volume where no one has written quality content yet.

I've seen well-selected keywords with high-quality articles bring 80% of total traffic on some niche websites. One right keyword can beat dozens of mediocre ones.

Google tries to verify you're a real, trustworthy entity. Being consistent everywhere helps to that regard. Your brand name, website URL, and social links should be identical across every platform: Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Twitter/X, directories, and anywhere else you're listed.

Add JSON-LD structured data to your website to explicitly tell Google who you are (more on this below). Include social links in your footer. When you submit to a new directory, double-check everything matches exactly.

This is called NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone) in local SEO, but it applies to any online business. When Google sees the same information repeated consistently across trusted sources, it builds confidence that your entity is legitimate, and associate the different “objects” together.

Inconsistencies like different brand names, outdated URLs, missing profiles create doubt. Consistency creates trust signals.

Here are a few places outside of your website where you should be present to build this trust signal:

Not all directories are equal. Most are worthless for SEO.

The rule is simple: if it's free and anyone can post, don't expect much from it. Generic directories like webwiki.com or random "top 100 startups" lists won't accomplish anything positive.

What works: curated directories that actually vet submissions. These have real domain authority and send qualified traffic, not just backlinks.

Examples that matter:

Programmatic SEO means creating a large amount of pages using templates and data. Instead of writing each page manually, you create a template and populate it with structured data. One template, thousands of pages, each targeting a specific long-tail keyword.

The most classic example is probably Zapier's integration pages ("Connect Slack to Google Sheets", etc.).

To make this work, you need 3 things:

Once you have this, create a template that packs in as much useful information as possible. The more value per page, the better it ranks. You can also use AI to generate unique intros or descriptions for each page, so Google doesn't flag them as duplicate content.

FAQs let you target long-tail keywords, match search intent directly, and qualify for SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rich snippets. That's FAQPage schema. More real estate on the SERP = higher CTR for your website.

Things get more interesting with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. AI is reshaping search, and some experts even claim this to be a new game: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). FAQs are perfectly designed for it.

The reason is that LLMs retrieve information differently, which is known as the query fan out phenomenon. When you ask an AI a complex question, it doesn't run one search. It fans out your query into multiple sub-queries behind the scenes. One user question might trigger 5-10 searches.

If your FAQ or content answers those sub-queries directly, you become a source the AI pulls from. Each Q&A pair is a potential entry point. Because AI systems are doing Q&A, and your FAQ section is formatted as Q&A, you're speaking their language.

Link building is an important part of SEO, and it’s probably the most unsexy part; it usually means doing cold outreach campaigns to reach out to website owners. Here are 4 proven strategies you can use for reaching out:

These methods work, but they're either time-consuming or hardly scalable. You need to find prospects, verify their domain authority, craft personalized emails, and follow up. Reciprocal insertions are also dangerous when scaled because your backlink graph could end up looking suspicious to Google if you only have reciprocal links. And the tools required for this manual work usually cost $250+ / month.

That's why I built BlogSEO's ABC backlink exchange network. Users exchange high-quality, relevant, in-context backlinks without the cold outreach grind, and without the reciprocal link penalty thanks to a triangle link structure (Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site A).

BlogSEO users’ websites are matched automatically with other websites using BlogSEO of a similar niche, and the system automatically insert in-context in the auto-published blog articles.

This feature has been killing it since launch, and users are loving it; it’s great to see my users’ domain rating going up!

This is a low hanging fruit, especially for SaaS. And it’s also useful for SEA.

Why they matter for SEO: People searching "alternatives to [Competitor]", "[Competitor] reviews", or "[Competitor] vs [Your brand]" are bottom-of-funnel leads. They've already decided to buy; they're just picking which option. These are the highest-intent, highest-value leads in your market. You want content tailored specifically for them.

Why they matter for SEA: Google scores your ads on relevancy. Bid on a keyword that doesn't match your landing page? Your ad gets shown less often or at a higher CPC. Google does that to protect the user experience. This kills competitor brand bidding, your landing page has nothing to do with their brand name.

Creating comparison pages fix this issue. Now when you bid on "[Competitor] alternative," your landing page title includes that exact keyword. Relevancy score goes up, CPC goes down, ads get shown more, on high intent, competitor leads.

A few important notes on comparison pages:

Schema markup (JSON-LD) tells Google explicitly what your content is. Instead of hoping Google figures it out, you're handing them structured data on a silver platter.

Most sites either skip schema entirely or add generic "Website" markup that does nothing. Here are the three that actually move the needle:

Implementation is simple. Most CMS platforms have plugins, or you can generate the JSON-LD manually and paste it in your page's <head>. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test before publishing.

If you just apply the first 2 tactics, it can boost your ranking by up to 10 positions in less than 2 weeks (for real).

If you're patient enough to play the long game, and apply the different tactics, I think the results speak for themselves:

I hope this helps you reach the results you’re aiming for in 2026!

PS: If you liked these SEO tips, you might be interested by the full version of this post. I trimmed it because it was too long, but it originally included the 10 most common SEO mistakes & nice-to-haves for faster results.

Since the last newsletter, I've grown BlogSEO to $50,000 ARR. Huge milestone. I never thought I'd reach this point when I first started the project.

Users are loving the new backlink exchange network, and I think it's been a big driver of recent growth. In my last newsletter, I talked about how important onboarding is and how it can completely change your growth trajectory. Well, it happened again. I changed one sentence in my onboarding.

Conversions doubled.

One sentence. 100% increase on revenue with the simplest change ever. It's both humbling and frustrating (all that revenue left on the table because I didn't catch it earlier).

I have big ambitions for 2026. Main goal: $1M+ ARR by the end of the year. That's a ~2,500% increase from where I am now. Sounds insane. But broken down, it's 30% monthly growth. Ambitious, but not impossible. I’m super pumped for 2026 🚀

I met Quentin at the beginning of 2025, before I even started working on BlogSEO, when he hired me for a short freelance mission on Souk, his bootstrapped startup. Souk is a lightning-fast Vinted scraper that gives users a personalized feed of freshly posted products, with the ability to autocop items before anyone else. The mobile app also lets you set up alerts and get instant notifications when something matching your criteria drops.

I really admire Quentin. He's a repeat entrepreneur and successful solo founder. And god knows it's hard when a large portion of your business is B2C. I got to see how Souk works behind the scenes thanks to the freelance mission. Honestly, it's the most impressive codebase I've ever worked on.

Quentin has been both an inspiration for me and proof of what's possible as a solo founder. He also played a key role in the incubation of BlogSEO. We discussed the BlogSEO idea a lot and he helped me validate it before the first commit ever happened. He's also the one who convinced me to quit my job to go all in on BlogSEO, so I owe him a lot.

If you're a Vinted power user, check out Souk, it will surely help you a lot!

Until next time, keep scaling! 🚀

Vince