I’m Olivier, a SaaS founder who knew almost nothing about SEO 18 months ago. This article describes a framework I call Founder-Led SEO that goes through my journey to grow SEO at Activity Messenger with little time, money and no prior SEO experience. Founder-Led SEO helped triple our MRR, increase clicks by 1700% and impressions by 1600%. Search now accounts for over 65% of our total leads. If you’re a founder looking to grow your business with SEO, lets connect on Linkedin.
(If you’d like to skip to the how-to like you do on your favorite brownie recipe, click here
Disclaimer: I am no SEO expert. Far from it. Just a self-taught founder who’s getting results. For more in-depth SEO advice, please contact an SEO expert or agency.
I vividly remember letting go of Luke, our only sales rep.
That one hurt.
He was the right person, just not the right timing.
Proof is we re-hired him 14 months later, but that’s for another story.
So in August 2023, I was back to square one. Alone, generating revenue for Activity Messenger.
We were three years in, sitting at 25k in MRR.
We had raised a bit of money with TinySeed but were still not profitable.
Martin, Michael and I all knew SEO made sense for a product like Activity Messenger.
But we also knew it was going to be a long process.
Long to get results.
Long to create and publish.
Long before it would bring in consistent sales.
I knew our ICP like the back of my hand, having been one myself for over 12 years.
Did it make sense to push SEO this early?
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As you can guess by the title of the article, we went all in.
But when I first started generating content, I didn’t have a team of writers or a background in SEO.
All I had was a deep understanding of our industry and a relentless drive to grow the company.
And thanks to my co-founders Martin and Michael, I was working with the best product in the industry.
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I googled “Founder-Led SEO” in December 2024 and here were the results. Nada.
That’s because Founder-led SEO makes no sense.
This makes it a terrible way to allocate resources for early stage founders.
And then came AI.
I know….ewww AI written content.
But hear me out. (I don’t recommend mass producing AI content. I’ll explain my process later)
Before AI, not only did Founder-led SEO not make sense, it was impossible.
Startups focus on sales, partnerships, paid ads, or cold outreach to survive.
And they should.
This leaves SEO as a long-term strategy often pushed to the side, especially early on.
But SEO is like compound interest. So if you start today, SEO has the potential to completely change the trajectory of your startup.
It did for us.
Founder-led SEO typically requires:
You’ll need 3 things:
That’s it.
The rest, you’ll learn along the way.
Here’s the how:
Don’t worry, I had no clue what these terms meant either.
Why I focus on these two types of content.
Instead of targeting broad, competitive terms like “how to send bulk SMS,” I focus on a specific search query that meets the needs of my target audience.
So I added “for summer camps”.
This is what long-tail means.
I’m still the only person in the world who has explicitly targeted this exact search intent (even though there are over 20,000 camps in the US alone).
I rank #1 with my blog article and #2 with my youtube video.
This article is very niche and gets very few clicks.
But the clicks are from my ideal customers looking for a solution to a problem we solve.
| Aspect | Broad Keyword | Niche Keyword |
|---|---|---|
| Example | How to Send Bulk SMS | How to Send Bulk SMS for Camps |
| Competition | Competes with companies that have a much higher Domain Rating. | Much less competition in a specific niche. |
| Time to Rank | Takes months or even years to rank. | Ranks much faster. |
| Content Requirements | Requires a more complete and in-depth article. | Does not need a perfect article to perform well. |
| Expertise | Harder to show niche expertise. | Highlights your expertise in your niche. |
📌 Pro Tip: Once a how-to guide is written, I create a video of the same guide but for another type of client. For example, how to create a dance registration form can easily be adapted for swimming, gymnastics, camps, etc.
These are real gems.
Zero search volume keywords are terms or phrases that appear to have little to no search demand in keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
Here’s what I mean.
The keyword “Dance progress reports” has zero-volume of clicks per month on Ahrefs.
But I got 112 clicks in the last 3 months in Google Search Console.
More importantly, I got 3 demos and 2 sales from this article since it was published 12 months ago.
It doesn’t seem like much, but by adding up hundreds of articles targeting zero-volume keywords, we started getting consistent SEO results.
Mark Williams explains the concept very well in this Linkedin post.
Talk to your customer support team and get the database of live chat questions. If your customers are actively asking these questions, and the question or phrase is showing up in the SEO tools, it means there is in fact a search volume – and it is likely a high-intent one, too.
So while a single keyword may have no search volume, related keywords may have significant combined search volume.
📌 Pro Tip: Create 15-20 pieces of content with zero volume keywords on a specific industry to create a content cluster. For example, I wrote over 25 articles for dance studios and then linked them together which helps search engine know that I am an expert on the topic.
When starting out with SEO you might think:
“I need my articles to be perfect to rank”.
But the key here is to focus on quantity first and target zero-volume keywords.
Content velocity refers to the speed and volume of content you create. The more content you produce, the faster you collect insights (feedback loop) on what works.
Your unique industry insights and stories are what set you apart. But your articles don’t have to be groundbreaking works of literature. Mine aren’t. I simply share my insights in a way that answers my audience’s questions. For example, even though I’m far from great at copywriting, you can probably relate to the pain I’m describing in this article.
The core type of content I create is the “How to do X” , where I explain how to complete a specific tasks.
Another type of content I like to focus on are the “Alternative to X Software” articles. These posts target prospects already searching for alternatives to popular software but who may not be familiar with our product.
Another staple in our content strategy is the “7 Best X software” list posts. These posts target users who are aware of specific software categories and are looking for a solution.
I’ve heard “AI experts” say that Prompt Engineering is the future of content.
I completely disagree.
Information gain is.
As more content gets published by AI, it’s all sounding the same.
Except the ones edited by industry experts with real-life stories. Like you and I.
That content will rise to the top.
Here’s how I edit and improve the AI blog version of my video.
How I identify and remove AI fluff:
Here’s how I use DeepL to enhance my content:
AI can help you create a first draft, but your industry knowledge is what makes or breaks the content. Here’s how I make sure that every section of an articles reflects that I am an expert on the topic:
In the SEO world, industry insight is know as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Here’s how I share my expertise and industry insights to my content:
One of the easiest ways to establish authority and connect with your audience is to include a detailed author’s note.
Like this👇
You know tips and tricks that only someone with your experience can share. Including them in your blog posts adds value to your readers. They won’t find it in a generic article on the same topic.
Stories show how you or your clients apply the insights in your content to solve problems. They give readers a clear, practical understanding of how it works in the real world.
I was able to create 10 years’ worth of content in just 18 months.
That’s over 250 articles of founder insights.
But this high-volume SEO strategy would never have made sense before AI.
Here’s why:
Creating videos is often a faster, more engaging way to communicate expertise.
Once you’ve recorded a video explaining your product’s key features or customers’ pain points, AI can transcribe, clean up, and structure that video into a blog post.
AI allows you to scale your content creation and SEO efforts without investing an enormous amount of time or money up front.
I do every single product demo. When I create videos explaining our product and how it helps our ICPs, I’m also honing my sales pitch. All 250+ short videos I’ve recorded have helped me better explain the benefits of Activity Messenger during sales calls.
Video content also builds trust. Prospects see me explain how my software has helped me scratch my own itch. My demo conversion rate when a prospect mentions that they’ve watched some of my videos is close to 100%.
A time-consuming part of traditional SEO is working with a team of writers, editors, and translators.
But with founder-led SEO, you’re the expert.
You don’t need an outside writer to explain your product’s complexities or the problems your solution solves.
And AI does the heavy lifting when it comes to structuring, translating, and editing your content.
When I realized that SEO would work for Activity Messenger, I committed to a three-month deep dive to learn the basics. During that time, I binged on SEO podcasts and tutorials. I consumed everything I could to learn the basics. And I wrote a lot during this time too to implement everything. This intense focus gave me a strong SEO foundation on which to build our strategy.
Key SEO podcast and blogs I follow to create the founder-led SEO framework.
Recommendations for people to follow on Linkedin.
SEO must drive sales. Nothing else really matters. Or as Andrew Holland puts it: Traffic is Vanity. Profit is Sanity.
Every piece of content should be created with the intention of moving users down the funnel and converting them into paying customers.
Once I started getting results, I hired Grip an SEO agency for 6-months growth sprint to coach me on my SEO strategy.
📌 Pro Tip: If you were to erase everything I’ve learned in the last 18 months and could only learn SEO from one source, it would be the Grow and Convert blog blog and YouTube channel. Hands down.
Keyword research in SEO is the process of finding and analyzing search terms to create content that ranks on Google and other search platforms.
But keyword research alone has its limitations. If you’re relying solely on data (as we saw previously wth zero-volume keywords), you can miss valuable content to create.
Here’s why it can give you an edge:
When I tell people that I used to create content before AI, it almost feels like telling my kids that I used to have a diskman to listen to my Still D.R.E. album. That’s how fast things are moving.
I’m not an SEO expert, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
But I don’t think the result we’re seeing with Activity Messenger is a fluke. Founder-led SEO could be the future of how early-stage startups drive organic growth.
This may or may not work for your startup. I’m just sharing how I got started with SEO as a startup founder and how it helped triple my startup’s MRR in 18 months.
One thing is clear: Founder-Led SEO has completely changed the trajectory of Activity Messenger.
If you enjoyed this and would like to discuss it further, let’s connect on Linkedin.
