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Easy growth hacks to improve your SEO game

Hi all, I recently launched GrowthExpert.ai Growth AI which gives growth-related expert help to startup founders. Here I am sharing some pieces of my training data that I have created. I hope it helps.

Build a free, useful tool to get backlinks

If you are running a content-driven website and rely on search traffic, one of the best ways of boosting your rankings is to get backlinks.

There is a simple trick to get backlinks: building a very simple, easy-to-use tool for a niche market.

Why? Because tools are x12 times more likely to get backlinks and social shares.

Some examples:
• A Mortgage Calculator (ex: Zillow)
• A tool to convert gross salary to net salary

If these types of tools do not fit your niche, you can consider building a cheat sheet, a planning document, or a reference chart.

How To Implement This Tip

  1. Decide what kind of tool you want to make. It should be directly related to what your business is doing.
  2. Get a freelancer from Upwork to build it for you. Or purchase it from CodeCanyon
  3. Make sure its URL is like this: yourwebsite .com/tool Do not put it in a subdomain, because backlinks directing a subdomain does not count for your .com domain.
  4. Make sure that you put internal links to your tool.
  5. Optional: you can also ask for email addresses from users and capture leads.

Put your domain on the “ref” for your outgoing links to other sites that you linked to them

One of the best ways to get backlinks is to give backlinks. When webmasters see that others are linking them, sometimes they link back. I have seen this tens of times.

So, to alert other websites that you are linking to them is to put a “ref” section to your outgoing links.

Like this: somelink .com/?ref=mysitecom

When they check analytics they will notice your page way more easily and hopefully link back.

Help Reporters & get backlinks or mentions by signing up to HARO

One great way to build backlinks and brand mentions easily is by leveraging yourself as an expert on a particular topic. You can use a service called Help A Reporter Out (HARO) for this purpose.

What HARO does is connecting you with reporters and bloggers who need sources and quotes from industry experts for the stories they are writing.

How To Do It:

  1. Sign up for an account at helpareporter.com. Free account gets you free queries which are sent to your inbox 3 times each day. You can also get more with a paid account.

  2. Once you’ve pick a query, respond with your quote and a short bio and a link to your website.

Donate Little Money To Get Links From Crowdfunding Campaigns

Crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter or Indiegogo usually display their supporter's names and websites on their pages.

You get listed on those pages and get a quick & easy backlink by donating them the littlest money possible.

But beware, this is in a grey area in terms of “paid links”. Use this strategy at your own risk.

Keyword Optimize Your Pages With Search Console Data

There is a huge data mine that you can use to improve your pages’ performance: Google Search Console

In the Search Console, you can see which keywords bring the most traffic to which pages. Also, you can see the search volumes of these keywords.

What you need to do is, to check each page on Search Console and analyze their most effective keywords. Then you can optimize your page with the highest volume keywords. Simple.

How To Do It:

  1. Go to search console: https://search.google.com/search-console/
  2. Go to the “Performance” section
  3. Click on “+ new” and choose “page” from the dropdown list and type the URL of a blog post or page on your website. Click “apply”

Now you see all the keywords and search volumes of these keywords that are bringing your page traffic.

Optimize your page to include these keywords. Prioritize the keywords with the highest search volumes!

Write Testimonials To Get Backlinks

You may be using different services for your start-up. Hosting service, brand alerts service, or any type of service.

What you can do is reach out to your service providers and give them a testimonial.

If they include your website and testimonial on their testimonials page, you get an easy backlink!


If you find these useful you can check out GrowthExpert.ai and ask my AI more specific questions about growth. It is still in beta, I would appreciate your feedback!

  1. 2

    Thank you for sharing such an informative post. My off-page SEO is not too good. But this post will be helpful for me to take my off-page SEO to the next level. Thanks again.

  2. 1

    Really used this article to push me to 🚢 that free tool that I planned for such a long time.

    Thanks for the push:

    https://www.backlinkgpt.com/free-seo-tools/backlink-outreach-message-generator

  3. 1

    What is the response rate you see from HARO? I have tried to respond to 10 but no one replied.

  4. 1

    ooo I love it so good ❤️

    what kind of tool would you recommend to build for our startup: bluedothq.com ?

    i'm all the time thinking about the ways we can boost our SEO.

    1. 1

      Who is your target audience? Build something helpful for them.

      Here's one of my favorite, incredibly clever, examples. They target people in their late 20's-early 40's, probably have a family or are starting to get one going. So they created BabyBookie. A place where friends can guess the birth date/weight of another friend's newborn.

      BabyBookie is "Brought to you by Pointless Corp.", which is a subsidiary of "viget", who create digital products (like an AI shopping platform).

      Figure out who your audience is and build something super helpful, without much monetary potential, that is created solely to drive traffic.

      https://www.babybookie.com/

  5. 1

    Love how actionable and non-obvious these are!

  6. 1

    hi, thanks, the information in the article is well structured)))

  7. 1

    This is super helpful as a one man band who is a bit overwhelmed by the SEO World!

  8. 1

    I didn't think about writing testimonials to get backlinks before. Thanks for sharing.

    1. 2

      I was doing the same for Linkedin and it worked great.

      I wrote a post praising one of the products we are using and they reposted this on their channels.

      We got lots of traffic from it since they have 10x the following base.

  9. 1

    Thanks for this insight, it is an interesting strategy for acquiring backlinks. How are currently prioritizing the implementation of these techniques for Growthbaze.com?

    By the way, I am building an AI-powered browser extension. If you're interested, you can sign up for the waitlist, it is a product that will help indie hackers surf the net smarter, better and faster. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12_61gyfbikrw-2g3iNmfEgB3iW-Mci-AGiqpEDnPwQ4/edit?pli=1

  10. 1

    Thank you for sharing!

  11. 1

    I don't know how much it'll work but I'll take into consideration adding
    ?ref="website.com" to my urls.

    Here's the javascript to add it to all external URLS on the page:

    document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
      var links = document.querySelectorAll('a');
      links.forEach(function (link) {
            // Check if the link is an external link
        if (link.hostname !== window.location.hostname) {
                // Add the ref attribute to the link
          link.href = link.href + (link.href.includes('?') ? '&' : '?') + 'ref=https://mywebsite.com';
        }
      });
    });
    
  12. 0

    To boost your SEO, optimize meta tags, create quality content, leverage long-tail keywords, build backlinks from reputable sites, improve website speed, utilize social media, encourage user reviews, and implement schema markup. Regularly update content, prioritize mobile optimization, and monitor analytics for continuous improvement.

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