I Spent a Year Optimising for SEO and Got Zero Traffic

I'm a full-stack software engineer in an early stage startup. We are focusing on building an "engagement platform" for fans of the specific industry we are targeting. The problem: we neither have original content, nor product-market fit.

Being the only software engineer with web experience, I was directly tasked by my CEO to "optimise SEO for our website because getting organic traffic gives us quality users and it's free!"

So what did I, the sudden appointed 'head of web development' (because there's no one else to do despite this being my first full-time SWE role), do? Of course I spent months combing through NextJS docs and optimising code patterns to have good SEO for our site.

After a year of being utterly discouraged because my pages were not even indexed on search, I learned that SEO wasn't even my business to take care of. Despite leadership emphasising the importance, the underlying issue was that we didn't have original content to be indexed in the first place, and there was no extra effort put into actually ensuring this was done.

Here is what this year taught me:

1. Technical excellence ≠ Business results. Doing things well doesn't necessarily translate to getting actual results; a bitter pill to swallow.
2. Failing to plan is planning to fail. If goals are not clear, milestones will be misaligned and the road to take will be completely confusing. Hard work only makes sense when there is a clear direction to build towards
3. There are no stupid questions. This is probably the most humbling point. I kept my pride thinking I would be able to figure everything out and get things done myself when... I was completely clueless. Rather look stupid in the short term than to waste an entire year's worth of resources. Arguably, it's not my fault, but it's still work that was mine to own. I could definitely have approached the problem very differently.

Application: What comes next?

Here's what I am doing about it; the purpose of this website + blog: I want to learn organic growth from scratch - content strategy, audience building, engagement systems - and documenting everything on this site. Every experiment, every mistake, every breakthrough.

This blog will cover:

• What I'm learning from growth experts and books
• Real experiments I'm running (with actual data), even this blog.
• Technical implementations of growth strategies
• Honest reflections on what's working and what's not

If you're a developer trying to understand the business side, or anyone interested in organic growth strategies - welcome. Let's figure this out together.

If you're not a developer, welcome too! I'll be explaining the technical side in plain language as I learn it myself.