Story of every indie hacker: you ship. Nobody comes. First instinct isn't to fix the product — it's to spam backlinks. A Reddit thread here, 20 directory submissions there, forum signatures everywhere. Feels super productive.
One month later you open Search Console: single-digit impressions.
I did exactly this. It took me a long post-mortem to finally get one thing:
Backlinks are invitations. Send a thousand invitations to a house with no doors — guests still can't get in.
Most of us blame “not enough backlinks”. The real bottleneck: your site has one homepage and one feature page. When Google wants to recommend you, it has no idea where to send someone searching “how do I fix X”.
So I stopped chasing backlinks and started building doors — an entry-page matrix. Here's what that looks like:
Split up your feature pages
Don't stack every keyword on one mega homepage. Building an AI image describer? Ship separate pages: Image to Prompt, Screenshot to Text, Alt Text Generator. One page, one clear intent.
Use-case pages
Users don't search your product name. They search their own situation: “product description generator for Shopify”, “Instagram caption generator”. These pages convert the best — the visitor already knows exactly what problem they need solved.
Template / example pages
Give people something they can copy-paste right now. Pages don't need to be long. If it's instantly useful, they'll bookmark you.
Comparison / alternative pages
“X Alternative” and “A vs B” pages carry the highest commercial intent on the internet. Don't trash your competitors. Be honest about pricing, differences, and who each tool is actually for.
FAQ pages
Every support ticket, every question in the comments — each one is a page waiting to be written.
A cadence that works: +1 feature page, +1 use-case page, +1 template page, +1 comparison/FAQ page every week. And refresh 10 old pages every month — titles, internal links. Updating old pages often beats writing new posts.
The one trap
Don't mass-generate doorway spam. “Image to Text for Students / for Teachers / for Marketers” with nearly identical content gets flagged as low quality fast. Every page needs real, distinct content — different scenarios, different examples.
One line to remember:
Backlinks decide whether Google finds you. Entry pages decide how many people Google sends through your door.
Build the doors first. Then send the invitations.
X Article: https://x.com/bb833dong/article/2103144610705047679