Breaking down Danny Postma's SEO strategy for HeadshotPro: $300k+ in 1 year
We all know @dannypostma is seeing crazy success ($300,000+) w/ HeadshotPro and the rest of his portfolio of AI products since selling his previous company.
At first I assumed it was all from AI hype.
Then I heard Danny mention on the Indie Hackers pod last week that he uses SEO to drive traffic.
So I did some digging to find out how.
Ranking in 10 top for high-volume keywords
First thing I found: Headshot gets 3k monthly organic visitors. How?
For one, he's ranking in top 10 for "professional headshots," which has:
- 🔎 Monthly search volume: 21k
- 🤙 Keyword Difficulty: 23
- Plus 193 other keywords (a lot also with good search volume)
The kicker? He did this in under 3 months:
Ok wow. How did he do that?
Two-Pronged SEO Approach
He used a two-pronged approach:
1. Programmatic SEO
By generating 200+ pages for different cities and counties (aka programmatic SEO), Danny ranked for long-tail keywords like:
- "professional headshots san francisco"
- "professional headshots boston"
2. Writing blog posts targeting this keyword
Notice a trend in these titles?
"Ok," you say, "but only he can do this because he has a high domain rating."
Eh, not necessarily true. He has a domain rating of 44, which is good (the 21,000 backlinks help). But it's not unattainable. It looks like he pretty much started at 35 when he launched, probably getting a good chunk of backlinks and referring domains from his launch on Product Hunt and elsewhere.
Then in April the real backlinks came in. It's not clear if he went out and sought them, or if they came naturally as his product became more well-known and referred to.
Luckily Danny chimed in to my tweet and filled in the gaps of how he did this:
Either way, this is the quickest ROI on SEO I've seen. Usually it takes months for Google to figure out how to position your listing.
My Takeaways:
- Programmatic SEO is the fast way
- SEO via individual blog posts is the slow way
- Doing both compounds your results
- Go all in on a good topic
Fun thing I found:
I think this all started with him messing around with AI-generated profile pictures in February?
and now the shameless plug bcuz i spent a lot of time writing this.
I have a free SEO resource, Honest Guide to SEO for IndieMakers specifically for indie makers. It doesn't cover programmatic, just individual blog writing for keywords, but it's a good "get off the ground" guide.
🔥 Roast My Landing Page
programmatic SEO in combination with links from authority pages in your niche has worked for a lot of my projects. Important to keep the programmatic pages light (i.e. don't import too much javascript apps so that google can efficiently crawl your page).
One of the main issues for me was always indexing, hence I build seocopilot.com to index all new pages immediately
With so much uncertainty in the future of SEO due to AI and Google search changes I feel it’s a waste of my time to worry too much about SEO. Am I wrong?
A search engine will always be there to help us find answers to our questions. If you want that search engine to know who you are and why you matter, then I'd say that Search Engine Optimization will not be a waste of time. The engine may look different and evolve over time, but it will always look at YOUR data to determine if you have the answer. Don't let your competitors answer more questions and solve more pain points. The search engines just might offer them as a better solution than you when the time comes. Also... probly time to invest in community building ;)
I've had this thought before too. I decided that even if the landscape changes, there will still need to be a supply of content/data so although where/when/how you get benefits from creating SEO content may change, there will still be some sort of distribution of it (i.e. an AI is trained on Google search results, so if you're on there, you will appear in the AI's response)
In general, it can seem like we're "late to the game" for a lot of tech trends or strategies but my outlook is we're still relatively early for a lot of it and there is still tons of room. and sitting on the sidelines or investing in the really new stuff (i.e. Clubhouse) is actually more risky.
I'm going to try programmatic SEO with ChatGPT, feeding it relevant info from my database to avoid being penalized and automate the entire thing. If it fails, I lose nothing but a few hours of setup.
wow, it looks like his domain went from DR0-> DR44 in 2 months then.
I can see he acquired backlinks from 120 domains in 2 months - not to bad (probably leveraging his existing domains) + then producthunt and other news outlets picking it up.
It'd be interesting to see if he can really outrank local photographers.
not bad!
Yup exactly. He said his Twitter audience helps with. backlinks a lot too, I guess if people see it on and then write about it on their blogs/websites/etc.
Really good write up, thank you. Enjoyed reading it. Programmatic SEO is something that every business should think about.
thanks! and thanks for reading it :) Agreed
Not hard to reproduce these results if thats all it took
I agree, not necessarily hard but does take considerable effort, focus, time, etc.
incredible post, thank you @bagelsangranola!
quick q: where do you get Keyword Difficulty from?
True keyword difficulty can be calculated on trykeywordspy.com
my question is... how do you do programmatic SEO??
Basically you generate a bunch of pages using a template and populate it with different data.
There are some tools like https://pagefactory.app/ that I think help do it w/o code but i haven't used it yet.
I'm going to be doing an similar experiment for my new AI app 🦾 Generating 200+ pages seem a little aggressive though.. I wonder if Google would look at some of those as "duplicate" content.
Yeah I think thats the risk, they need to be different enough , have different data. but not sure how they measure that
Looks like its website disappeared from high ranking positions at least on Google in my area.
It is just evil hack for users & Google.
Google hates websites generating contents which are not valuable automatically.
what area are you in? It does vary by country
if it really was so easy...
hah it always seems easy in hindsight!
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