50 Bootstrapped SaaS Firms Dominating search engine optimisation in 2024

We analyzed the natural site visitors progress of 1,600 SaaS firms to find the search engine optimisation methods that work finest in 2024.

On this article, we’re specializing in bootstrapped software program firms—those that have by no means raised exterior funding. All search engine optimisation information featured right here comes piping sizzling from the Ahrefs API.

In a nutshell: free instruments, programmatic content material, and content material localization characteristic closely.

Smallpdf presents free instruments for modifying and changing PDF information. They’ve an estimated annual income of $17,500,000.

Smallpdf	2023	2024	Absolute change	% change
Natural site visitors	41,145,810	55,455,141	14,309,331	34.78%
Natural pages	3,367	3,506	139	4.13%
Natural key phrases	466,048	416,115	-49,933	-10.71%
Key phrases in prime 3	54,933	69,359	14,426	26.26%

Smallpdf’s site visitors progress comes completely from—you guessed it—free PDF instruments. Conversion instruments (changing from PDF to Phrase Doc, from JPG to PDF, and so forth) drive the vast majority of the positioning’s site visitors:

These free instruments goal extraordinarily excessive quantity key phrases, like pdf to phrase with an estimated 3.9M searches in Indonesia alone. Right here’s the precise web page that ranks so nicely:

These instruments have additionally been localized to completely different languages, with the Spanish-, Indonesian- and Portuguese-targeted subfolders producing a big portion of the web site’s site visitors progress:

The most important single driver of BuiltWith’s progress is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtwith.com/ko, housing localized variations of 191 web site pages:

Different language subfolders (significantly /de, /es, and /fr) additionally generate a good quantity of site visitors:

Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a strong all-in-one search engine optimisation toolset, and the supply of all of the search engine optimisation information on this article.

Ahrefs	2023	2024	Absolute change	% change
Natural site visitors	2,171,168	4,271,413	2,100,245	96.73%
Natural pages	4,522	18,982	14,460	319.77%
Natural key phrases	225,855	231,761	5,906	2.61%
Key phrases in prime 3	14,291	20,618	6,327	44.27%

We don’t want conjecture right here. Our free AI writing instruments are chargeable for an enormous a part of our natural site visitors progress:

Our paragraph rewriter (113k visits monthly), paraphrasing software (99k), and instagram caption generator (73k) are significantly common:

Attempt them out for yourselves right here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools.

We additionally launched a programmatic search engine optimisation marketing campaign, utilizing Ahrefs information to rank the world’s hottest web sites:

The localized variations of those pages—significantly Swedish and French—account for almost all of the site visitors:

One in all Surfshark’s fastest-growing pages is a free IP handle checking software:

However curiously, many of the firm’s natural progress has come from branded key phrases, like surfshark low cost code, surfshark offers, and surfshark login:

This can be a good indication that the corporate has been investing closely in model advertising, growing branded search queries as a byproduct.

Trying on the Paid search studies in Ahrefs, we are able to see that the corporate launched a considerable promoting marketing campaign within the final couple of months (we’ve logged 876 separate adverts):

Huge, costly model promoting campaigns aren’t frequent for bootstrapped firms.

Though the fundraising information means that Surfshark has by no means raised outdoors capital, their web site shares that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Safety merged underneath one holding firm to type a cybersecurity powerhouse whereas nonetheless working independently.”

This means that Surfshark is probably not bootstrapped within the truest sense (however I’ve left it in as a result of it showcases an attention-grabbing—and costly—approach to develop natural site visitors).

All of IPQS’ site visitors progress (and actually, 57% of their complete estimated natural site visitors) comes from a single web page, a free software for trying up telephone numbers:

This web page manages to rank in first place for key phrases like telephone quantity lookup (353K month-to-month searches within the US), telephone lookup (48K), and verify this telephone (35K):

This, regardless of simply 84 referring domains and a design that most likely appeared good circa 2005:

Remaining ideas

We’ll share extra of those analyses within the coming weeks. Need us to incorporate your organization within the subsequent spherical? Simply fill out this brief Google Kind.