How I fixed my SEO

I never paid attention to SEO because I didn't believe good leads would search for engineers on Google.

Boy, has that changed.

We've been heavily investing in SEO over the last 10 months, and it's starting to pick up.

Leads break down in February:

It's crazy to think where we might be now if we started doing this five years ago.

Back then, the most work we did was targeting our competitors keywords (in a legal way). As a result, one of the biggest ones threatened to sue us.

Otherwise, we were writing generic articles that had very little value for SEO.

In 2023, I decided to focus on channels that have long-term compounding and scalable effects. We did a test with Programmatic SEO, and it showed early signals of success.

Most pages had high conversion:

To double down on SEO, I brought in Mike Yon to guide my team through it.

Before working with Mike, we only touched the surface of Programmatic SEO.

He explained it in a way that finally clicked:

So instead of manually creating pages one by one, we use structured data to dynamically generate them based on what users are searching for. 

In our case, we had tons of supply-and-demand data for hiring tech talent—

• Hourly rates

• Skills 

• Coding languages

• Project types

This means that Programmatic SEO works extremely well for us, because we can use that data to build pages like “Hire a JavaScript Developer” or “Hire a PHP Developer” using real-time, useful information.

But we were screwing it up

Before Mike came in, we had already built the framework for Programmatic SEO, but it wasn’t working. We had the pages, but they weren’t ranking. Traffic was a trickle instead of a flood.

Mike quickly pointed out two big issues:

1. Google couldn’t make sense of our site.

There were 404 errors, redirect loops, and wasted crawl budget leading search engines down pointless rabbit holes. Google wasn’t even able to crawl some of our most important pages.

The first step was cleaning up our technical SEO. “If your foundation is broken, no amount of content will fix it,” Mike told me. 

So we tackled status code errors, fixed our crawl patterns, and made sure search engines could actually find and index our pages properly.

2. Our pages weren’t optimized for engagement.

Even if someone landed on a page, we weren’t doing a good enough job of guiding them toward the action we wanted them to take. The pages were cluttered, CTAs weren’t clear, and we were losing potential conversions.

Mike said this a really common mistake:

So we focused on improving UX. 

To do that, we asked ourselves two questions:

1. What is the primary action we want users to take?

2. Is that action obvious?

Following those guidelines, we cleaned up visual clutter, improved internal linking, and made sure each page had a clear purpose.

The results so far…

It’s still early, but organic search is already a leading source of new leads. Most importantly, by ranking high on Google, we are sending a signal to LLMs to recommend us for hiring engineers.

We already closed 3 clients this year that came from ChatGPT and Perplexity. 

Unlike blog content, which takes months (or years) to compound, Programmatic SEO can generate results much faster if executed well.

That said, it’s not a silver bullet. 

It still takes time for real benefits to compound.

So if you’re a founder looking to improve your SEO, I suggest that you ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you possess structured data?

2. Can you create a repeatable content format?

If the answer is “yes” to either of those questions, Programmatic SEO is a no-brainer in my opinion.

The key is ensuring the content is valuable — not just auto-generated garbage that exists solely to rank on Google.

For Lemon.io, this is another way that we can provide useful, data-driven content to the startups we serve, so it’s more than just an SEO play. 

And with Mike’s help, it’s already proving to be one of our most effective growth levers.

–Aleksandr

P.S. — Want to chat about SEO, or get an intro to Mike Yon? Hit reply. Always happy to connect.

Catch you next Sunday!