The less obvious traffic source of successful indie hackers and how to tap into it

I used to think that the successful indie hackers like Pieter Levels get most of their traffic through their online following and maybe some newsletters. But later I found out that it could not be further from the truth.

Their audience and reputation definitely helps a ton during the launch. But their long term game is focused on steady organic traffic, often gained through SEO.

A while ago I discovered an article from Mark Lou about programmatic SEO.

The concept is pretty simple:

1. You find a long tail keyword that:
   • gets enough search volume
   • is not hard to rank for according to SEO tools
   • can be turned into a template like "marketing jobs in {city}"
   • you could collect or generate enough data for to generate pages for many of these keyword combinations
2. You create a page template for the data
3. You fill it with the data
4. You do the technical SEO basics like sitemaps, SSR etc.
5. You build some backlinks
6. You promote it a bit
7. You wait for the traffic
8. If it comes you monetize it
9. Profit

Sounds simple right?

The only down-side is that you need to wait for multiple months to see any results because it takes some time for SEO to kick in.

I decided to try it myself to see if I can get it to work.

Btw. I am not an SEO pro in any way. I just want to share this with you. Maybe it will help you or at least inspire you to try it too.

So what am I building?

Recently I decided to lose some weight. I thought it would be cool to build a calculator where you can input your body parameters, how much you want to lose or gain and in which time-frame and it would tell you how many calories you should eat every day to hit that goal.

I did some keyword research using Ahrefs. They have a free keyword difficulty checker that you can try here.

You input some keywords and see how hard it would be to rank for them.

In my case I want to try to rank for keywords like "how to lose 50 lbs in 3 months"

There is some search volume. Not that much but some is there according to Ahrefs.

But this is just one of many keywords I will try to rank for using the templated pages.

The goal is to get a enough traffic from many keywords combined, not to get a ton of traffic from one single keyword.

And how did I build it?
My tech stack is quite simple. I have a ton of work experience with Next.js so I chose that since I move the fastest with it. I used turborepo from the start since I want it to be easy to add some APIs to it in the future. I chose shadcn because it allows me to build UIs very fast with their pre-built components and also tailwind. Also AI works very well with this stack to speed things up.

Then I built the calculator that can answer a specific search query like "how to lose 20 lbs in a month"

When the user comes to the page, the variables are parsed from the URL and pre-filled into the calculator. It also performs the calculations and generates the dynamic text that tells you the recommended caloric intakes for some predefined static randomly chosen male and female parameters.

Below that it tells you that to find out the right caloric intake for you, you need to fill in your parameters. You can fill them in and instantly get your result for free.

When I had the calculator I needed a way for Google to discover dynamically generated pages.

That is done in two ways.

1. using a sitemap
2. ensuring that it can somehow find a link to each page on the website

I did both. I generated a large sitemap.xml with all the keyword combinations I want to rank for. You can take a look how that sitemap looks here

I also added a section with "similar calculations" to each dynamic page and generated the links in a way that will allow crawlers to find all the pages.

Now when Google has a way to discover all the pages you can take the sitemap and go to Google search console and submit your sitemap to help Google discover you faster.

After that it is just a long waiting game. In the mean time you can do things to help you rank higher. Build some backlinks, list in some directories, create content and learn more about SEO.

I am new to this and the backlink building guide recommended by Marc in that article was pretty helpful.

Now I just need to do the work and see if it actually works.

I never wrote any blog posts so I hope this did not bore you to death and I hope you find this helpful or at least inspiring.

If you have any questions or even any advice for me, I will be glad for any comments!