SaaS SEO for Solo Founders: Where Your Hours Pay Off
An SEO plan for solo SaaS founders, worked through a real market: the four pages worth building, the lists to get onto, and how to tell it's working.
If you run a SaaS on your own, SEO gets whatever hours are left after support tickets and shipping. A funded competitor can put a content team on it and publish forty pages a quarter. You can build about four, so most of the work is picking the right four.
This guide is a plan for those hours. You'll come away knowing:
- which searches to target first, and which to ignore however big they look
- how to read a results page to decide whether to build a page, a tool or nothing
- the four pages to build first
- how to get onto the lists and threads you can't outrank, which is also where AI assistants look
- a 15-minute monthly check that tells you whether it's working
Each step ends with a prompt you can run on your own product. To keep it concrete, we'll work through one example with numbers from OpenSEO: Snappa, a bootstrapped design tool competing with Canva. Its founder, Christopher Gimmer, discussed what search did for the company on the Unscripted SEO podcast, including what stopped working.
SEO for startups covers the fundamentals if you need them first. To run the prompts, connect OpenSEO MCP to your AI agent.
Table of Contents
- Where your hours pay off
- Start with the searches buyers make
- Read the results page before you build
- Build four pages, not forty
- Get onto the pages you can't outrank
- Keep your footprint consistent for AI assistants
- Check it once a month
- Three or four years alive is most of the strategy
Where your hours pay off
Three kinds of page work for a small SaaS. For searches you can't win, get onto someone else's list instead. Here's an example search from the design-tool market for each:
| Build this | Example search | Searches a month | Difficulty | Who ranks now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| An alternatives page | canva alternatives | 1,900 | 0 | Tools' own lists |
| Comparison pages | snappa vs canva | 40 | 0 | Snappa's own page |
| A tool page for one job | youtube thumbnail maker | 4,400 | 44 | Canva, Adobe, tools |
| A spot on others' lists | best graphic design software | 1,000 | 30 | G2, PCMag, HubSpot |
Every row is a search from someone already shopping for a tool, which is why a small number of searches can still pay. The sections below show how to find these rows in your own market and pick your four.
Start with the searches buyers make
Greg Digneo grows revenue for SaaS companies. On the Unscripted SEO podcast he put the priority plainly:
don't think about traffic, don't think about keywords, think about revenue. Because that's all your CEO cares about, that's all your client cares about, is how much revenue are you going to bring in.
You have no CEO, but the decision is the same: which handful of pages bring in signups. Start with three seeds: your category ("graphic design software"), your biggest competitor's name plus "alternative," and the main job your product does ("youtube thumbnail maker"). Keep only the searches from someone choosing a tool, and drop the rest, however big.
The big numbers in the design-tool market are tempting and mostly out of reach. "Background remover" gets 1.2 million searches a month at difficulty 66, and "graphic design software" gets 14,800 at 46. Meanwhile "canva alternatives" gets 1,900 at difficulty 0, and everyone searching it is shopping.
Cost per click helps you rank what's left, because it's what advertisers already pay to reach that searcher. "Canva alternatives" costs $5.70 a click, more than most of the "maker" searches around it. A difficulty of 0 can also mean there wasn't enough data to score the search, so check the results page before you commit a page to it.
I run [product], a [category] tool for [buyer]. My biggest competitor
is [competitor]. Use OpenSEO to research keywords for "[category]
software", "[competitor] alternative" and "[main job your product
does]". Keep only searches from someone choosing a tool, such as
alternatives, comparisons and tools for one job. Show volume,
difficulty and CPC, sorted by CPC.Read the results page before you build
Volume and difficulty tell you a search is worth having. The results page tells you what kind of page wins it. Here are three from the design-tool market, all pulled the same day.
"Canva alternatives." An AI Overview sits on top. The first organic result is a "7 Best Canva Alternatives" list from mockupgenerator.ai, a mockup tool that ranks itself first. ManyPixels does the same lower on the page, and Adobe ranks with its own comparison page. A YouTube video, a Reddit thread, an XDA article and a Quora answer fill in the rest. You can win this search with an honest alternatives page: say who each tool suits, and put yourself where you actually fit.
"Snappa vs canva." Snappa's own comparison page is the first organic result, and OpenSEO's data also has it ranking first for "websites like canva," at 880 searches a month. Further down the same page, another design tool, DocHipo, ranks with "Snappa vs Canva vs DocHipo." It added itself to a comparison between two bigger names, which is a page any small tool can write.
"Youtube thumbnail maker." Canva and Adobe hold the top two spots with working tools. Below them sit tool pages from four smaller companies: vidIQ, Pixlr, WayinVideo and OpusClip. None of the top results is an article. The page that wins is the tool itself, with a short explanation around it.
All three of these results pages had an AI Overview. That costs little on a tool search like the thumbnail maker, where people still need the tool, and the most on searches with a one-line answer, like an image size.
For the top 5 searches on my list, pull the live Google results. For
each one, tell me what kind of page wins: a tool, a list of
alternatives, a comparison page, a guide or a forum thread. Flag any
search with an AI Overview, and tell me which kind of page I should
build for each.Build four pages, not forty
Build an alternatives page for your biggest competitor, a comparison against them, a three-way page that adds you to the biggest head-to-head in your market, and a free tool for one job your product does. For Snappa, those four are:
- an alternatives page for "canva alternatives" (1,900 searches a month, difficulty 0)
- a comparison page for "snappa vs canva"
- a Canva vs Adobe Express vs Snappa page, for the 390 monthly searches of "canva vs adobe express" (difficulty 2)
- a Twitter header maker (590 a month, difficulty 0), an easier win than the thumbnail maker at 44
The tool page is the one most likely to earn links. Gimmer puts the difficulty of traditional link building down to inbox fatigue, and names what still gets a response:
people are more willing and likely to link out to a really good tool that actually solves a problem versus yet another blog post with a wall of text.
A solo founder can build a small free tool in a weekend. Producing a hundred blog posts is the thing a funded team does well and you will never match.
Snappa's example also shows what to put next to the tool. Snappa's early growth came from content built before the product existed. Gimmer, on the Unscripted SEO podcast:
We did like I think 2,000 MRR in the first month or 4,000 MRR ... I think we got to 10K MRR in like six months and ... 95% of our signups were just coming from that one blog post and our free stock photo site.
The blog post was about where to find free stock photos, and the site was StockSnap, which that post spawned. That exact play is closed now: "free stock photos" gets 22,200 searches a month at a difficulty of 100, the top of the scale.
Snappa's search traffic today comes from a newer version of the same idea. By OpenSEO's estimate, its biggest non-brand pages are size guides: Twitter header size at about 46,000 visits a month, YouTube thumbnail size at 16,000, Instagram story dimensions at 11,000 and Facebook cover photo size at 10,000. Each one answers the question a buyer asks just before they start designing. The answers are short, though. "Youtube thumbnail size" gets 27,100 searches a month at difficulty 10, and an AI Overview now sits above every result. The answer, 1280 by 720 pixels, fits in one line, so plenty of searchers never click. Gimmer described the same effect:
Even though we're ranking number one for some of these keywords, the AI Overviews are answering some of those things, and so we're losing out on some of those clicks.
If you write a guide like that, make the tool the next step on the page, because an AI Overview can answer the question but can't make the thumbnail.
Get onto the pages you can't outrank
"Best graphic design software" is a page of publishers and big brands: G2, PCMag, HubSpot and Adobe, plus a Reddit thread and a YouTube video. A small tool won't outrank them, and doesn't need to. Snappa doesn't rank on its own for "canva alternatives," but it appears in two of the results that do: the Quora answer and the ManyPixels list both include it. To get onto a list article, email whoever maintains it with one line on who your tool suits, and offer a free account so they can try it.
The same goes for the places where people ask for recommendations: Reddit, Quora and Facebook groups. Answer as the founder, say what your tool is good and bad at, and link when it helps.
Jason Wade of Ninja AI makes the same case for the work most people skip. On the Unscripted SEO podcast:
we know what works on the margin that people will not do. Joining the Better Business Bureau. Go join. You know, speaking at an event.
He says of one appearance that "I did a podcast and it ranked instantly." As a solo founder, you can say yes to a podcast or an event without asking anyone.
Pull the Google results for "best [category] software" and
"[competitor] alternatives". List every page that recommends tools,
including review sites, list articles, Reddit threads and Quora
answers. For each one, tell me whether [product] is mentioned, and
which ones I should ask to be added to.Keep your footprint consistent for AI assistants
More buyers now ask ChatGPT or Claude which tool to use. Those assistants often search the web before they answer, so the lists and threads above feed what they say about you. Everything they find should describe your product the same way.
Ann Smarty has been an SEO for over twenty years, and she uses herself as the cautionary example. On the Unscripted SEO podcast, talking about getting language models to say a consistent thing about you:
Don't be like me. ... My footprint is a mess.
As a new solo founder, your footprint is small enough to audit in an afternoon: your profiles, directory listings, bios and app store pages. You can make them all describe the product the same way this week. A company with fifteen years of history and four departments can't. Ann's own list of where to start includes directory submissions, which she says language models now lean on after twenty years of the industry writing them off.
The same speed applies to technical fixes. Schema markup states your prices, reviews and product names outright, so a model doesn't have to infer them from the page. One person with commit access decides and deploys it in the same afternoon, with no ticket and no handoff.
Check it once a month
Fifteen minutes a month is enough. Look at three things for your four pages:
- Impressions in Google Search Console. A new page usually gets seen before it gets clicked, so rising impressions are the first sign it's working.
- Position for each page's target search. Track the four searches you built the pages for.
- Signups from search. That's the number Digneo would ask about.
Give each page a few months before you judge it, and change one page at a time so you know what moved.
Check my four SEO pages: [URLs]. From Search Console, show clicks and
impressions for each over the last 28 days compared with the 28 days
before. From Google Analytics, show signup key events from organic
search on each page for the same two periods. Then check where each
page ranks for its target search: [searches]. Tell me which pages are
gaining and which need work.Three or four years alive is most of the strategy
Every page above compounds, and none of them pays this month. Gimmer's blog post was ranking well before Snappa existed.
Near the end of his interview on the Unscripted SaaS podcast, weighing investors against staying bootstrapped, Malith Gamage put it plainly:
main advice is don't die. Like as long as if you can stay for like three, four years alive, then you're good.
Four pages a quarter is a pace one person can keep for years. Next quarter, run the same research on your next-biggest competitor and the next job your product does. Sustaining it is the part that beats the funded team, because funded content programs change owners often, and the strategy usually changes with them.
To run this on your own market, OpenSEO is $10 a month with $10 of usage credits included, and signing up is free with $0.50 of trial credits.
