SEO Playbooks for Founders
Organic-growth tactics from founders who built real search traffic — programmatic pages, content that ranks, and the link-building that actually moved the needle. Every entry is sourced from a founder interview.
91 tactics · page 3 of 4
“A great lifecycle program starts outside of the app. It starts with a need or a want, then the user discovers the app and they're all going to go through the app store. You start the user journey there — your ad creative and your app store page set the expectation you then need to deliver on in the very first session.”
Lifecycle starts in the App Store — qualify users before they install
Lifecycle and onboarding aren't separate from acquisition. The ASO page sets the expectation; activation has to deliver on it in session one. Misalignment between the promise on the store page and the actual first run is the cheapest place to bleed retention — and the easiest to fix.
“Even though they were headquartered in Berlin, they built it global from the start. When I came in to help them level up on mobile, we made sure that we translated the app store page into all the languages — when I came in it was just in English.”
Localize the store page even before localizing the app
SoundCloud's organic growth lever wasn't a German-first launch — it was translating the store listing into every language so any market could catch fire. You don't know which market will resonate; remove the localization friction at the cheapest layer (the listing) before you invest in full app translation.
“Users can create new species in Greg, we curate that, then we publish that page on the web, and it starts showing up in Google search traffic for other people. A user publishes a web page, more users find our app, then they publish more web pages — a very positive reinforcement loop.”
User-generated plant species pages become a compounding SEO loop
Greg crowdsources its species database from inside the app, then publishes curated public pages indexed by Google for long-tail plant searches. Each new user can spin up more pages, creating a UGC-to-SEO flywheel that grows acquisition without ad spend — and solves a data problem and a distribution problem at the same time.
“When we write a surf report for a certain location, if surfers are going to a new area trying to figure out where to surf, they'll Google 'what are the surf conditions at El Porto' and they'll land on Surfline. There's a lot of traffic coming into those spot pages.”
Per-spot SEO pages dominate "surf at El Porto" Google for every break worldwide
Surfline runs effectively zero paid acquisition. Their growth engine is content-as-product: programmatic per-location surf reports updating daily that rank for high-intent 'surf at X' searches worldwide. The same pages serve users in product, build SEO equity, and feed the freemium funnel.
“There is one thing is like the download velocity. The more downloads you have the more you raise in the rankings in the search results. The chicken and eggs problem. If we're not in the top results... most of them they purchase App Store ads so in the end they are before us in the rankings they are purchasing ads but what's their profitability?”
ASO download-velocity is a flywheel competitors break by burning ad money
Organic ASO ranking is partly a function of download velocity, which creates a feedback loop competitors break by buying App Store ads. Public revenue tools (app figures) don't deduct ad spend — so the apps ranking above you may be running negative margins. Don't benchmark against ranking alone.
“Suddenly, since it was like a really well-known platform, they lost so much organic discoverability — people were looking for that and they were not finding. And at the same time there was such a big drop in conversion because all these people that were looking for Adidas shoes on the app store... would say wait a moment, where's the shoes that I wanted to buy.”
Runtastic → Adidas Running rebrand vaporized ASO and tanked conversion
Adidas renamed Runtastic and destroyed branded-search demand while simultaneously poisoning store conversion — visitors searching 'adidas' expected shoes and bounced. Facebook event volume collapsed too, breaking the entire ad stack. Be very wary of renaming an app whose brand name is doing free acquisition work.
“If the energy it requires to send somebody to RevenueCat or Expo or whatever is always less than the energy it would take to generate the tokens, like the model should just optimize towards that outcome.”
The energy-gradient: AI keeps recommending the same tools because it's cheaper than generating from scratch
Jacob's gradient-descent framing: models will route users to existing solutions whenever that's cheaper than generating equivalent code. Once you're the established 'relative minimum' for a problem (auth, payments, mobile delivery), the model keeps reinforcing the referral. New entrants only get a look where there's genuinely unexplored space.
“If you just sort of say like go make me a website, like almost every model is going to default to doing React and sort of lean that direction and then probably tell you to go to Expo too.”
Software defaults to React because that's where the training data is
LLMs reinforce whatever has the most open-source examples. React wins websites by default; Expo wins mobile by default. For developer-tool SEO, this means tooling adjacent to the LLM-default stack gets surfaced for free in every 'how do I' answer the model generates — earning AI-default status is now a distribution channel.
“We use the App Store custom product URLs and we actually measure how many leads we get from YouTube versus... a different URL for Instagram, for YouTube, for Facebook, for our website, and then we can see and attribute revenue directly to that.”
Custom App Store product URLs finally unlocked per-channel revenue attribution
After eight years of mostly-unattributed content, the recent unlock was App Store Custom Product Pages with channel-specific URLs — finally producing per-channel revenue attribution. Most subscription apps doing content marketing are still flying blind here; this is a low-effort instrumentation win that retroactively justifies (or kills) channels.
“Best-in-class content that provides a solution to whatever question they're typing into that browser — which is like how do I lose weight, how do I need a friend, how do I find someone to date. All these questions that consumers ask every day. If you provide top-level answers to that, consumers will find you.”
Win acquisition by ranking on the questions users already type
The acquisition playbook for consumer subscription apps is to rank for the exact questions prospects type. Crowley sets the bar at 'top-level answers' — not surface content. The same asset will increasingly need to be AI-searchable as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews replace traditional SERPs. Skip content and you're stuck paying Meta forever.
“If you picture it, it's really those apps that were the titles. So the apps that were called Flashlight App or the apps that were called QR Code Scanner — really trying to maximize that ASO.”
Naming the app after the keyword — the old ASO playbook still teaches a lesson
When Peleg describes Blue Throne 1.0's flashlight/QR-scanner portfolio era, the through-line is brutally on-the-nose naming for App Store keyword capture. A historical reminder that the cheapest organic acquisition channel for years was just putting the search term in the title — and modern ASO still rewards apps that align name, subtitle, and keywords with what people actually type.
“habit kit finally started to rank in the top five for a big keyword on the App Store and Google Play that led to Crazy growth in downloads and revenue... I actually didn't change anything back then for 3 months”
Being above the App Store fold is day and night
HabitKit cracked the top 5 for a major habit-tracking keyword with no deliberate change after months of stagnation — and downloads and revenue exploded. Sebastian describes the App Store fold as a day-night divide: visibility above it means organic installs at scale; below it means near-invisibility. Getting above the fold on one big keyword, not gaming dozens of minor ones, is the highest-leverage ASO move for a solo indie app.
“I guess it's in the nature of habit tracking apps that it's heavily influenced by seasonality so at the start of the year lots of people make resolutions for the new year start new hobbies or just generally want to improve themselves”
New-year seasonality made Jan–Feb > all of prior year
HabitKit earned $60K in January–February 2024 alone — more than all of 2023's $51K — purely from the new-year resolution wave. Sebastian had not changed his marketing or the app; the App Store ranking he'd built up just caught the seasonal spike. For lifestyle and habit apps, aligning store listing updates, review prompts, and any pushes to the January window can multiply annual revenue in a single two-month period.
“what happens now if you get a call from an unknown number while it's ringing you run over to Google and you type it in... let's just make landing pages for every one of those phone numbers so when you type it in it'll say Nomorobo and this is a scam call”
Programmatic SEO from your own data exhaust
Nomorobo built landing pages for every known robocall number, each populated with recordings, transcriptions, and a CTA to block the caller and try the app. The content came entirely from call data the product was already generating. The moat was structural — competitors could not replicate the pages without the same data pipeline, and the pages ranked for searches users were already doing in real time.
“You can now target based on keywords so if I find your app based on a certain keyword search you might want to show me a very different custom store listing experiment to maximize my conversion... we're also suggesting the keywords that are important ones for you to customize.”
Custom Play Store Listings Targetable by Keyword Boost Organic Search Conversion
Google Play now lets developers serve different store listing variants based on the search keyword that brought a user to the page. Someone searching 'meditation for sleep' should see a sleep-focused listing, not a generic brand one. The store even suggests which keywords warrant custom listings based on traffic signals — a largely unused conversion lever.
“App store really democratizes everyone like just how Paramount Pictures and a YouTube influencer at the same stage when it comes to YouTube — a new app can pretty much get the top spot.”
App Store is the great equalizer — even Microsoft competes keyword-by-keyword
The App Store gives no permanent advantage based on company size or brand recognition. Microsoft targets competitor keywords and 'jobs-to-be-done' terms because any smaller app can outrank them if it does the work. That democratic reality means keyword strategy matters just as much for a trillion-dollar company as for a solo founder.
“Somebody may be looking for invoice and may end up at Excel because not everybody is like a business owner looking for a QuickBooks type of solution — sometimes you just need something very simple.”
Jobs-to-be-done keywords beat brand keywords — target "invoice" not "Excel"
Microsoft builds its ASO strategy around what users are actually trying to accomplish: resume creation, note taking, invoice creation, budgeting. Users searching a task keyword — not a brand — are high-intent acquirers. Mapping your app to specific jobs-to-be-done in your keyword bank surfaces it to users who wouldn't search your brand name.
“If we do find from ASA we find some things that are high performing we can obviously bring it back to our general ASO — and there's also the whole MMP angle there with ASO like trying to really make sense that if this is the keyword that is only driving monthly active usage or is it driving real subscription.”
Let Apple Search Ads tell you which keywords actually drive subscriptions — then move them organic
Running Apple Search Ads alongside organic ASO isn't just a spend decision — it's a measurement tool. Paid search reveals which keywords convert to paying subscribers, not just installs or MAU. Once a high-monetization keyword is identified through ASA data, fold it into the organic keyword bank to capture free traffic with proven LTV.
“Their main source of traffic was people searching alternative to couch to 5K and they had this one blog post that ranked really high for that people went to the blog post then people go from the blog post to the App Store to becoming a subscriber so you would even lump organic traffic in that.”
SEO Blog Post as Organic Web2App Funnel — One Ranking Article Can Drive Subscriptions
Web2app isn't just paid ads — organic search counts too. One fitness app ranked for 'alternative to Couch to 5K,' used that single blog post to funnel search traffic to the App Store and convert subscribers. This is a zero-cost acquisition channel: write once, rank, and let the funnel do the rest. Nathan points to it as proof that web2app is broader than most people assume.
“We have a jobs to be done approach like we know okay we think that these are the 10 things that we really want our apps to rank for… what kind of customers do you want to acquire the ones that will actually find value enough that they will want to pay for the premium subscription.”
JTBD Before ASO: Know Which Jobs You Want to Rank For Before Choosing Keywords
Microsoft's keyword strategy starts from jobs-to-be-done — what tasks users actually need to complete — not just search volume. The second filter is monetization intent: rank for keywords that attract users willing to pay, not just search. Pairing JTBD with keyword research closes the gap between traffic and revenue.
“I didn't have a better name — because the content of it was so generic. It's the early days of the App Store so you could just pick a proper noun and it would be available… if you want an audiobook and you search 'audiobooks' it's an exact name match.”
Name Your App the Exact Keyword Users Search For
David stumbled into one of the most durable ASO strategies by accident: naming an app after the exact search term users type. Years later, 'Audiobooks' still captures high-intent search traffic because the name itself is the query. The lesson extends to any niche where the category term isn't yet taken — own the noun before someone else does.
“Our legacy seo... we have this amazing legacy seo and that was that product channel fit that brought me here... we're able to parlay all of that mobile first seo traffic into incremental organic app installs and that's a huge driver of our business we get millions and millions of incremental app installs that we don't pay a dime for every month.”
Legacy SEO Converts To Free App Installs — Millions Per Month, Zero Paid Acquisition
AllTrails' decade-old trail-page SEO doesn't just drive web traffic — as mobile behavior shifted, those same search visitors convert into free app installs at massive scale. Content produced years ago now compounds into distribution. For any app in a category with high-intent search demand (health, fitness, local), investing early in content SEO creates a distribution moat that paid UA can never match unit-economics-wise.
“For the streamer which we had absolutely nothing going for us no money no nothing and SEO ended up being the thing for us long tail SEO was huge so it just takes time right that takes time you need to be able to like survive as that thing kicks in and starts working.”
Long-tail SEO bootstrapped streamer to global scale — organic compound interest that just takes time
With zero budget and no audience, Siniawski's team built streamer.fm into a global AM/FM platform via long-tail SEO — ranking for thousands of low-competition radio station queries. The key was surviving long enough for SEO to compound: 12-24+ months. He notes uncertainty about whether this channel survives AI-generated search, but for the decade it worked it was the entire growth engine and cost nothing.
“Actually in the Stream uh like within streamer we had to launch the Prototype I think for Android and we have to put a name on Google Play and I don't know someone on our team came up with said the podcast app.”
Product name as SEO asset — 'Podcast App' is a generic keyword that keeps compounding
What started as a Google Play placeholder became a strategic SEO and word-of-mouth asset. 'Podcast App' ranks for the generic search term, creates memorable confusion ('the podcast app' vs any podcast app), and generates App Store keyword traffic without spend. It came from laziness, not strategy — but the accidental result is a brand that keeps working even as the product grows beyond the name.
“We definitely see based on the data that folks are seeing ads and then actually just going directly to the website not clicking on the ad. When you have an easy-to-remember domain like that that has domain authority I absolutely think that helps — and that was an intentional strategy on our part.”
A trusted domain like reading.com drives direct traffic from ad viewers who type it in — brand is conversion infrastructure
Teaching.com deliberately invested in exact-match domains (typing.com, reading.com, flashcards.com) for their SEO value and, critically, the instant trust signal they emit. For web2app funnels, domain trust reduces the sales burden. The reading.com data shows a meaningful share of ad viewers bypass the click entirely and type the URL — a signal that brand familiarity built through ad exposure converts through a channel that no attribution tool can measure.
“the big thing we've discovered is Google wants the number one source of traffic to the internet is now no longer the sole default right so if you're a builder or a marketer right and your job is to get your product in front of someone seo your website your content that was it and that fractured a lot over the last two years.”
SEO is the first channel fracturing — AI has broken the 30-year Google discovery moat
Crowley compares AI-driven SEO disruption to the shift from desktop to mobile: a total rebuild is required, but existing SEO cannot be let to decay. Traffic drops of 30–40% year-over-year are hitting major publishers. Consumer subscription founders need LLM-native discoverability strategies now, even while maintaining Google SEO, because the two audiences and intents are increasingly distinct.
“when it comes to SEO set of things as well I'll often use it at the beginning as an outline to be like to tell me what is the things that like is the most common advice on this topic um so I know what I have to include but it also tells me it's like okay this is the most common stuff this is going to be copycat content where do I what are some additional things that I can add that are originality nuggets”
Use AI to surface SEO originality nuggets, not to write the article
Feed AI the topic to map out the 20 things everyone already says — that's the table-stakes baseline. Then deliberately add original angles on top so the piece doesn't just rank, it converts and builds trust instead of regurgitating Google's existing index.
“the same things that will optimize something for like Google SEO are going to optimize it for your knowledge base generally like having keywords in your title and making sure it's in the URL and like using the words it's the same concept”
Write docs with the same SEO rules as blog posts
The optimization rules for ranking on Google and for ranking inside an internal docs search are identical: keyword in the title, keyword in the URL, the words people actually search for in the body. There's no reason to treat docs as a lower-craft surface than marketing pages — one template wins both ranking systems.
“it's a bit like getting traffic well you depend on Google it's like okay what what's there to do is like you just make sure that you don't screw it up and you don't do any blackhead SEO tactics which can get you banned and you do it you play by the rules”
Treat Google as platform risk — play by the rules, never chase tricks
Platform dependency (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic) is unavoidable for most businesses. The defensive playbook isn't to escape it — it's to avoid getting banned. The downside of a ban is total revenue loss; the upside of tricks is marginal. Asymmetric risk always favors compliance.
“we do a lot of blog articles with like how to read like not just like hey trust us but here's how you read industry standards yeah and here's what of you a d number is for and why they should have it and here's what you know an MC is for insurance”
Educate buyers on industry standards as marketing
In high-stakes markets (pet transport, healthcare, contractors), don't ask buyers to trust you — teach them how to evaluate any vendor. Write explainers on DOT numbers, MC licenses, USDA certificates, what each one means. Readers leave smarter, then trust your platform that already verified those signals by default. Education content compounds into SEO and trust simultaneously.