Most indie hackers are pre-validation. And IMO, that means most of us shouldn’t even be touching SEO… yet.

That said, I’ve been noodling on this for a while and, despite having a decent amount of SEO experience, I wasn’t sure if my anti-SEO hunch was right. So I did some digging.

Google gave me the usual “SEO is the only thing that matters” articles (written by SEO companies, surprise surprise). But diving into what actual indie hackers were saying gave me some gold. Here’s what I’ve found.

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Does SEO work for indie hackers?

From what I can see, there are three schools of thought here:

1. “SEO is king and there are lots of tactics that can get you on the first page of Google.” — SEO consultants and agencies
2. “SEO is essential, but you should just set up your site and write quality content for humans.” — Indie hackers who have had success with SEO
3. “SEO is dead for indie hackers. Google is being gamed by the big dogs.” Indie hackers who invested resources into SEO and got the short end of the stick.

And after reading through all their arguments, my TL;DR take is this:

Do SEO, but not until after your product is validated — like, money-in-your-pocket validated. Then increase SEO efforts a little bit at every stage of growth.

When SEO doesn’t work for indie hackers

SEO is a bad idea for indie hackers if they are A. Unvalidated, or B. Overextended.

Unvalidated products

Don’t waste time on SEO if you haven’t validated your product. Most product ideas do not get validated, so why spend time improving SEO on something that probably won’t go beyond an MVP?

If you are validating correctly, then it shouldn’t take long at all for you to get that validation (or not get it). Even if you think SEO needs to be started immediately, as I’ve seen so many people stress, it can surely wait a couple of months for your MVP to hit the market and get some validation data.

I did see one or two people who disagreed with this, but on the whole, I think this should be a pretty easy pill to swallow. Initial effort should be spent on building and releasing your MVP. Period.

Overextended founders

As far as being overextended, here’s what I mean. The time and money you have available will increase over the course of the product life-cycle. Money can purchase SEO services or create more time (via outsourcing, etc.). And time means that you can do more SEO or make more money. So don’t overextend yourself… Wait until you have more time or money, then spend it on SEO.

Brass tacks

SEO shouldn’t be all or nothing. It should be a gradient, a slow progression, that increases with time.

SEO Basics

So if we agree that SEO is worthwhile once your product is validated, then it’s important to dig into SEO a little deeper. I’ll cover the basics. Resources to go deeper will be included at the end.

There are three fundamental parts of SEO:

1. Technical SEO
2. On-page SEO
3. Off-page SEO

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is about allowing search engines to find, crawl, render, and index your webpages. Post-MVP, it’s important to get your technical SEO right. Not before, IMO.

There is a ton you can do with technical SEO, but here are some high-leverage items to get you started:

• XML sitemap: Your sitemap is a map for crawlers. Format it in an XML doc, and make sure you’re following the sitemap protocol. Then submit it to Google Search Console.
• Schema markup: This is how you can help search engines to understand your content. It also helps your site stand out — check out Google’s search features and the schema needed for them.
• SSL certificate: This is pretty obvious, but use https instead of http.
• Check your indexing: If a page can’t be indexed, fix it. Ahrefs has a free site-audit tool which includes an “indexability report”. You can also check your robots.txt file and look for “Disallow: /”.
• Check for broken links: Broken links tend to happen on older sites, but it’s still worth checking. Drlinkcheck.com can give you a report.
• Core Web Vitals: Check your load-time with Google’s PageSpeed tool. If it’s slow, optimize it. And keep an eye on general usability for site visitors too.
• Mobile-friendly: This is another common sense one, but it bears mentioning.
• Internal link