A step-by-step breakdown of how we scaled from 0 to 20K organic visitors in 6 months using niche intent SEO, pillar–cluster content, fast publishing, and authority-building. Designed for early-stage B2B SaaS founders.
Early on at Thena, we were in the same place as most B2B SaaS founders. Understanding the AI Trust Surface helped us build visibility fast.No growth team. No big budget. No SEO playbook.What we did have was this:A product that solved a real, painful problemBuyers who were already searching for that problem every daySo we did something simple and very hard to repeat consistently:We started writing. Every day. About real problems our product actually solved.Some examples:Customer messages get lost in Slack and no one notices until it’s too lateTeams can’t track or report support issues that start in SlackCustomer channels go silent even when there are unresolved asksWithin 30 days, we started seeing organic leads. Within 12 months, we were at 20,000+ organic visitors per month and a 10x increase in pipeline. No paid ads. Just focused content that spoke directly to teams at companies like Cloudflare, Braze, Clickhouse, Zapier, Amplitude, Vercel, Etsy, and Fox.This article is the strategy behind that system, not a hack. If you are an early founder, this is how you build SEO that drives pipeline, not vanity traffic.Step 1 – Start With Niche Intent, Not “Big” KeywordsMost founders open an SEO tool and immediately search for:“customer support software”“Slack tools”“SaaS support platform”These are:Highly competitiveVery broadFilled with comparison shoppers, not urgent buyersWe went the opposite way. We asked one question:“What exact problems does our product solve inside Slack, right now, for a stressed support leader?”That led to topics like:How to track support tickets inside SlackSlack workflows for customer support teamsSlack automation for CX and on-call teamsBest Slack integrations for support teamsSearch volume looked small. But the intent was perfect.Every person who searched for these problems was already close to our use case.Publish Fast, Don't Over-EngineerI wrote one article per day.Were they perfect? Absolutely not. Were they indexed fast? Yes.Early focus was on the basics:✦ Meta titles✦ Sitemap submissions✦ Quick indexingSpeed mattered more than polish.If you delay publishing to perfect - you lose momentumSimple intent rule for foundersType of KeywordExampleSearcher IntentValue for Early FounderGeneric“customer support platform”Browsing, comparing, not urgentLow - high noise, slow resultsNiche, workflow-based“track support tickets in Slack”Specific pain, clear contextVery high - closer to real pipelineStep 2 – Publish Fast, Then Learn From RealityI wrote one article per day.They were not perfect. Some were short. Some were rough.What mattered:Every article answered one very specific questionEvery article was indexable and technically cleanWe shipped consistentlyWe focused on the basics:Meta titles that matched the searchDescriptions that set expectationsSitemap + indexing working correctlyIf you wait to publish until it is perfect, you never get the data you need.Your job in the first 90–180 days is to ship enough content for Google and AI search to have an opinion about you.Step 3 – Listen to the Data and Double DownAfter a few weeks, patterns started to show up.Some posts jumped in impressions and clicksSome keywords climbed quicklySome angles got zero attentionWe did not guess. We did not cling to ideas we liked.We doubled down on what reality told us:More articles around the winning problemsVariants on the best-performing headlinesDeeper guides where shorter posts did wellSEO started feeling less like art and more like a scientific loop.SignalWhat It MeansFounder ActionHigh impressions, low clicksTopic is right, title is weakRewrite title and descriptionClicks and time on page highStrong problem matchCreate related cluster contentNo impressionsMisaligned keyword or technical issueRecheck keyword, on-page SEO, indexingStep 4 – Build a Scalable SEO Engine (Beyond the Founder)Once we knew the strategy was real, we moved from founder-led SEO to team-powered SEO.We brought in a teammate who owned:Advanced tracking and analytics with SemrushLong-tail keyword expansionPillar and cluster architectureBacklink strategy and outreachOur system shifted from “Govind writes” to “Thena has a content engine.”What the engine actually didTurned winning topics into pillar articlesBuilt clusters of related posts around each pillarCreated internal links that guided both users and crawlersReached out to relevant sites to earn real backlinksAt this stage, our SEO stopped being “blog posts” and became a structured acquisition system. For the modern evolution of this approach, see zero-click-search-strategy">how to win when Google gives away your answer.Step 5 – Add Social Proof EverywhereTraffic brings visitors. Social proof brings trust.We made sure every visitor saw a credible brand environment:Real reviews on software marketplacesListings on vendor comparison sitesCustomer logos and small case studiesDaily founder opinions on LinkedIn and XWeekly email updatesConsistent presence across communitiesThis lifted our DR...