50 Bootstrapped SaaS Companies Dominating SEO in 2024

We analyzed the natural site visitors development of 1,600 SaaS corporations to find the website positioning methods that work finest in 2024.

On this article, we’re specializing in bootstrapped software program corporations—those that have by no means raised exterior funding. All website positioning information featured right here comes piping scorching from the Ahrefs API.

This can be a checklist of bootstrapped SaaS corporations ordered by estimated month-to-month natural site visitors development from August 2023 to August 2024. Did you make the minimize?

High 5 bootstrapped SaaS corporations

For every of the highest 5 corporations, I ran a five-minute evaluation utilizing Ahrefs Website Explorer to know the website positioning methods driving their development.

In a nutshell: free instruments, programmatic content, and content material localization characteristic closely.

Smallpdf provides free instruments for modifying and changing PDF information. They’ve an estimated annual income of $17,500,000.

Smallpdf’s site visitors development comes fully from—you guessed it—free PDF instruments. Conversion instruments (changing from PDF to Phrase Doc, from JPG to PDF, and so forth) drive nearly all of the location’s site visitors:

These free instruments goal extraordinarily excessive quantity key phrases, like pdf to phrase with an estimated 3.9M searches in Indonesia alone. Right here’s the actual page that ranks so nicely:

These instruments have additionally been localized to totally different languages, with the Spanish-, Indonesian- and Portuguese-targeted subfolders producing a big portion of the web site’s site visitors development:

BuiltWith is a instrument for locating the applied sciences corporations use to make use of to construct their web sites. BuiltWith has an estimated annual income of $31,000,000.

The most important single driver of BuiltWith’s development is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtwith.com/ko, housing localized variations of 191 web site pages:

Different language subfolders (notably /de, /es, and /fr) additionally generate an honest quantity of site visitors:

Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a robust all-in-one website positioning toolset, and the supply of all of the website positioning information on this article.

We don’t want conjecture right here. Our free AI writing instruments are accountable for a giant a part of our natural site visitors development:

Our paragraph rewriter (113k visits per thirty days), paraphrasing instrument (99k), and instagram caption generator (73k) are notably common:

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

We additionally launched a programmatic SEO marketing campaign, utilizing Ahrefs information to rank the world’s hottest web sites:

The localized variations of those pages—notably Swedish and French—account for almost all of the site visitors:

Surfshark is a VPN instrument with an estimated annual income of $20,000,000.

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

However apparently, a lot of the firm’s natural development has come from branded key phrases, like surfshark low cost code, surfshark offers, and surfshark login:

This can be a good indication that the corporate has been investing closely in model advertising, growing branded search queries as a byproduct.

Wanting on the Paid search experiences in Ahrefs, we are able to see that the corporate launched a considerable promoting marketing campaign within the final couple of months (we’ve logged 876 separate adverts):

Huge, costly model promoting campaigns are usually not widespread for bootstrapped corporations.

Though the fundraising information means that Surfshark has by no means raised exterior capital, their web site shares that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Safety merged beneath one holding firm to type a cybersecurity powerhouse whereas nonetheless working independently.”

This implies that Surfshark is probably not bootstrapped within the truest sense (however I’ve left it in as a result of it showcases an fascinating—and costly—solution to develop natural site visitors).

IPQS is a fraud, bot detection, and IP validation instrument with an estimated annual income of $32,000,000.

All of IPQS’ site visitors development (and in reality, 57% of their complete estimated natural site visitors) comes from a single web page, a free tool for looking up phone numbers:

This web page manages to rank in first place for key phrases like cellphone quantity lookup (353K month-to-month searches within the US), cellphone lookup (48K), and examine this cellphone (35K):

This, regardless of simply 84 referring domains and a design that in all probability appeared good circa 2005:

Last ideas

We’ll share extra of those analyses within the coming weeks. Need us to incorporate your organization within the subsequent spherical? Just fill out this short Google Form.