I've been building BabyNamePick.com for about a month. Here's what I've learned about SEO for a content-heavy niche site.
The Numbers So Far
- 1900+ baby names from 46 cultural origins
- 117 blog posts
- 50 category pages
- 26 letter index pages
- 1900+ individual name pages
Total indexed pages: growing steadily in Google Search Console.
What Worked
1. Programmatic Pages
Every name gets its own page (/name/theodore, /name/amaia). Every category gets a page (/irish, /basque). Every letter gets a page (/letter/a). This creates thousands of indexable URLs from structured data.
2. Long-Form Blog Content
117 blog posts covering everything from names meaning star to Basque baby names. Each post targets a specific search intent.
3. Internal Linking
Every blog post links to related posts, category pages, and individual name pages. Every name page links back to its category. This creates a dense internal link graph.
4. Niche Coverage
Most baby name sites cover the same 10 origins. We cover 46 — including Basque, Mongolian, Georgian, Armenian, and Tibetan. Less competition, more long-tail traffic.
What Didn't Work (Yet)
External Backlinks
Blog comment backlinks (we submitted 112) haven't moved the needle much. Quality backlinks from relevant sites matter more than quantity.
Social Traffic
dev.to articles (75+ and counting) drive some referral traffic but haven't significantly impacted rankings.
Tech Stack for SEO
- Next.js with static export — fully static, fast loading
- Vercel hosting — edge CDN, great Core Web Vitals
- Structured data — JSON-LD for articles and FAQs
- Sitemap — auto-generated, submitted to GSC
Key Lesson
Content depth beats content breadth. One thorough guide to Armenian baby names outperforms ten shallow listicles.
The game is patience. SEO compounds over months, not days.
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