Eduard Albu

Posted on Dec 11 • Originally published at Medium

Week 5: Backlinks, Directory Submissions, and the Real Bottleneck to SEO Growth

#buildinpublic #indiehackers #seo #microsaas

Week 5 brought a shift in focus.

After four weeks of shipping tools and optimizing pages, I hit a wall that every new domain eventually faces: backlinks are the bottleneck.

You can have the best tool, the cleanest UI, the fastest load times. But without referring domains, Google treats you like background noise.

This week I stopped building new features long enough to attack the backlink problem directly.

Here is everything that happened between December 4 and December 11, 2025.

The Numbers After 5 Weeks

Traffic continues growing, but the composition is what matters:

Around 3,000 monthly visitors (consistent with Week 4)
57% direct traffic (users returning with bookmarks or PWA installs)
43% from search and AI (Google, Bing, ChatGPT combined)
18% bounce rate (steady, which means people are using the tools)
Nearly 4 minutes average session (up slightly from last week)

The growth curve is real, but it's slow. This is exactly what SEO feels like in the early months.

You ship. You wait. You optimize. You wait more.

The compounding hasn't kicked in yet, but the foundation is being built.

Two New Tools Shipped This Week

I added two more tools to QuickTools.one, bringing the total to 13.

Markdown to PDF

Convert Markdown files into formatted PDFs directly in the browser. Includes support for tables, code blocks, and custom styling.

Try it: https://quicktools.one/md-to-pdf

This one targets developers and technical writers. The keyword "markdown to pdf" gets 14,800 monthly searches with a difficulty score of 41. Not easy, but not impossible either.

More importantly, it fits the narrative: QuickTools.one is becoming a place where people can actually get work done without signing up for anything.

Video to GIF

Convert MP4, WebM, or MOV files to animated GIFs directly in the browser. Includes trimming, speed control, and Discord-ready presets for files under 8MB.

Try it: https://quicktools.one/video-to-gif

This one required ffmpeg.wasm, which made it more technically complex than the PDF tools. But the keyword volume justified the effort: "video to gif" gets 90,500 monthly searches.

The difficulty is higher (76), so I targeted secondary keywords instead: "video to gif conversion" at 9,900 volume with difficulty 9.

The Backlink Grind Begins

This week I submitted QuickTools.one to four high-value directories:

AlternativeTo (listed and live). This is one of the best directories for tool sites because users actively search for alternatives to established products.

Capterra (listed and live). B2B focused but still valuable for domain authority.

IndieHackers (product page created). The community is small but highly engaged, and the dofollow link helps.

Dev.to (account set up with plans to post technical articles). Developer audience aligns with the Markdown to PDF tool.

Four new referring domains in one week. Not glamorous work, but this is how domain authority builds.

Google Search Console Revealed the Real Numbers

I spent time this week comparing backlink data across tools.

Ubersuggest showed 4 backlinks. Google Search Console showed 56.

That is a 14x difference.

Here is what I learned: third-party SEO tools have crawl limitations. They only see a fraction of what Google sees. Their crawlers are slower and less comprehensive.

Google Search Console is the most accurate source because Google has the most comprehensive web crawl. If you want to know your real backlink count, check there first.

The 56 links break down across:

Browser extension directories (chrome-stats.com, mozilla.org)
Social platforms (reddit.com)
Content marketing (medium.com)
SaaS directories (saashub.com)
Development ecosystem (npmjs.com, libraries.io)

The "free plugins equal free backlinks" strategy from earlier weeks is working. Every browser extension, npm package, and directory listing generates links automatically.

Domain Authority Is Not What You Think

I also learned something important about domain authority scores this week.

Ahrefs has Domain Rating. Moz has Domain Authority. Semrush has Authority Score.

None of these are Google metrics.

Google discontinued public PageRank in 2016 and does not publish any domain-level authority score. These third-party metrics are approximations based on each tool's own crawl data.

This means domain authority scores are useful for relative comparisons and trend tracking, but they are not absolute measurements of how Google sees your site.

Better proxies for Google's internal authority:

Actual ranking performance for target keywords
Crawl frequency in Google Search Console
Indexing speed for new pages

When I added the Video to GIF tool, it was crawled and indexed within 48 hours. That is faster than Week 1, when pages sat in "Discovered, not indexed" for days.

Indexing speed is improving. That is a real signal.

Major Refactoring for Faster Development

I spent a full day refactoring all tools into reusable components.

Before: Each tool had duplicated code for file handling, progress indicators, and download logic.

After: Shared components that can be dropped into any new tool.

The result: building new tools now takes half the time.

This is the unsexy work that never makes it into launch tweets. But it compounds. Every hour invested in infrastructure saves multiple hours on future tools.

SEO Content Updates Based on Keyword Research

Using Ubersuggest, I identified high-value keyword variations and updated page content for four existing tools:

PDF Compress (added content targeting "compress pdf specific size" and "compress pdf adobe pro")

PDF Split (added sections for "split pdf into 2 files" and "split pdf adobe acrobat")

Compress Image (expanded content around "compress image reduce size" with specific size reduction expectations)

Resize Image (consolidated five related keywords including "resize image to exact size" and "resize image maintain quality")

The strategy is consolidating related keywords into comprehensive pages rather than creating thin content across multiple pages. This avoids cannibalization and provides more value to users.

What Backlinks Taught Me This Week

Backlinks are the primary growth bottleneck for new domains.

QuickTools.one has around 20 referring domains after 5 weeks. Competitors like iLovePDF and SmallPDF have 30,000+ referring domains.

That gap explains why they rank on page 1 and I do not. Yet.

The path forward:

Continue directory submissions to high-authority platforms
Publish technical articles on Dev.to and Medium
Update browser extensions and npm packages to include new tools
Create content worth linking to (guides, comparisons, resources)

This is a multi-month process. Domain authority compounds slowly, then accelerates.

Week 5 Summary

Metric	Value
Tools live	13
New tools this week	2 (Markdown to PDF, Video to GIF)
Referring domains	Around 20
External links (GSC)	56
Monthly visitors	Around 3,000
Direct traffic	57%
Search and AI traffic	43%
Bounce rate	18%
Avg session	Around 4 min