We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024.

In this article, we’re focusing on bootstrapped software companies—those who have never raised external funding. All SEO data featured here comes piping hot from the Ahrefs API.

Smallpdf offers free tools for editing and converting PDF files. They have an estimated annual revenue of $17,500,000.

Smallpdf	2023	2024	Absolute change	Percent change
Organic traffic	41,145,810	55,455,141	14,309,331	34.78%
Organic pages	3,367	3,506	139	4.13%
Organic keywords	466,048	416,115	-49,933	-10.71%
Keywords in top 3	54,933	69,359	14,426	26.26%

Smallpdf’s traffic growth comes entirely from—you guessed it—free PDF tools. Conversion tools (converting from PDF to Word Doc, from JPG to PDF, and so on) drive the majority of the site’s traffic:

These free tools target extremely high volume keywords, like pdf to word with an estimated 3.9M searches in Indonesia alone. Here’s the actual page that ranks so well:

These tools have also been localized to different languages, with the Spanish-, Indonesian- and Portuguese-targeted subfolders generating a large portion of the website’s traffic growth:

The biggest single driver of BuiltWith’s growth is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtwith.com/ko, housing localized versions of 191 website pages:

Other language subfolders (particularly /de, /es, and /fr) also generate a decent amount of traffic:

Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a powerful all-in-one SEO toolset, and the source of all the SEO data in this article.

We don’t need conjecture here. Our free AI writing tools are responsible for a big part of our organic traffic growth:

Our paragraph rewriter (113k visits per month), paraphrasing tool (99k), and instagram caption generator (73k) are particularly popular:

Try them out for yourselves here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools.

We also launched a programmatic SEO campaign, using Ahrefs data to rank the world’s most popular websites:

The localized versions of these pages—particularly Swedish and French—account for the majority of the traffic:

One of Surfshark’s fastest-growing pages is a free IP address checking tool:

But interestingly, most of the company’s organic growth has come from branded keywords, like surfshark discount code, surfshark deals, and surfshark login:

This is a good indication that the company has been investing heavily in brand marketing, increasing branded search queries as a byproduct.

Looking at the Paid search reports in Ahrefs, we can see that the company launched a substantial advertising campaign in the last couple of months (we’ve logged 876 separate ads):

Big, expensive brand advertising campaigns are not common for bootstrapped companies.

Although the fundraising data suggests that Surfshark has never raised outside capital, their website shares that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Security merged under one holding company to form a cybersecurity powerhouse while still operating independently.”

This suggests that Surfshark may not be bootstrapped in the truest sense (but I’ve left it in because it showcases an interesting—and expensive—way to grow organic traffic).

All of IPQS’ traffic growth (and in fact, 57% of their total estimated organic traffic) comes from a single page, a free tool for looking up phone numbers:

This page manages to rank in first place for keywords like phone number lookup (353K monthly searches in the US), phone lookup (48K), and check this phone (35K):

This, despite just 84 referring domains and a design that probably looked good circa 2005:

Final thoughts

We’ll share more of these analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next round? Just fill out this short Google Form.