The Indie Hacker Grind (March 2021): diving into SEO

Things aren’t changing as much as they were in the beginning (maybe we put in less time so we make less progress…), so an update every 3 months is probably sufficient for now. Here’s a link to the last one if you missed it.

I’ve been following a few Indie Hackers on Twitter that are growing successful bootstrapped companies from the ground up. They are inspirational and make me feel like statstest.com could be much better than it is right now.

Neil Patel does great SEO work, and in one of his latest videos he talked about one way to compare yourself to your competition using his UberSuggest tool.

This is a screenshot from UberSuggest that shows the details for statstest.com. You can see we have a domain authority of 1 (the lowest you can possibly have), 9 NoFollow backlinks, 7 referring domains, and ~700 unique users per month (according to UberSuggest). Now let’s look at some competitors.

This is statistics.laerd.com. For most stats terms they usually get a front page search result and are often the number 1 site for keywords.

They have a domain authority of 56, over 25k backlinks, over 4k referring domains, and an estimated 800k unique visitor count every month. These numbers are insane! No wonder our puny little site isn’t ranking #1 on search results for many searches.

I think what I learned from this exercise is we need to continue creating awesome content if we want to win some top keywords in the long term. There are already some pretty big existing players, but if you look at their content it is dense, full of jargon, and not very accessible. I think there is an opportunity for us to create an easy to use and understand statistical site that is much more accessible to people than other stats sites.

And here is our search result update:

Web Stats Update (past 3 months)

Back links: 8 (up from 5 3 months ago)
Organic search clicks: 2,360 (up from 1,250 3 months ago)
Average clickthrough rate: 1.3% (down from 1.4% 3 months ago)
Impressions: 175k (up from 86k 3 months ago)
Google Search avg. position: 18 (down from 20.4 3 months ago)

Image Stats Update (past 3 months)

Organic search clicks: 1,050 (up from 495, 3 months ago)
Average clickthrough rate: 0.6% (same as 0.6% 3 months ago)
Impressions: 188k (up from 83k 3 months ago)
Google Search avg. position: 29.6 (down from 34, 3 months ago)

Users Update (past 3 months)

Users: 6,447 (up from 3,300 3 months ago)
Sessions: 7,731 (up from 3,900 3 months ago)
Bounce Rate: 83.42% (down from 84.95% 3 months ago)
Session Duration: 1 minute 16 seconds (up from 1 minute 11 seconds 3 months ago)