50 bootstrapped SaaS companies will dominate SEO by 2024

We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the most effective SEO strategies in 2024.

In this article, we focus on bootstrapped software companies—those that have never raised outside funding. All SEO data provided here comes from Ahrefs API.

In short: free tools, stylized contentand content localization is very important.

Smallpdf provides free tools for editing and converting PDF files. Their estimated annual income is $17,500,000.

small pdf	2023	2024	absolute change	% change
organic traffic	41,145,810	55,455,141	14,309,331	34.78%
organic page	3,367	3,506	139	4.13%
organic keywords	466,048	416,115	-49,933	-10.71%
Keyword ranking top 3	54,933	69,359	14,426	26.26%

Smallpdf’s traffic growth comes entirely from – you guessed it – free PDF tools. Conversion tools (PDF to Word Doc, JPG to PDF, etc.) drive most of the website’s traffic:

These free tools target a large number of keywords such as pdf to word In Indonesia alone, there were an estimated 3.9 million searches. This is actual page Ranked so highly:

These tools have also been localized into different languages, with subfolders for Spanish, Indonesian, and Portuguese generating a large portion of the site’s traffic growth:

The biggest single driver of BuiltWith’s growth is the addition of the Korean subfolder. builtwith.com/kocontaining localized versions of 191 website pages:

Subfolders for other languages ​​(notably /de, /es, and /fr) also generate considerable traffic:

Oh hey, that’s us! Ahrefs is a powerful all-in-one SEO toolset and the source of all the SEO data in this article.

arefs	2023	2024	absolute change	% change
organic traffic	2,171,168	4,271,413	2,100,245	96.73%
organic page	4,522	18,982	14,460	319.77%
organic keywords	225,855	231,761	5,906	2.61%
Keyword ranking top 3	14,291	20,618	6,327	44.27%

We don’t need to guess here. Our free AI writing tool has contributed greatly to our organic traffic growth:

Our paragraph rewriter (113,000 visits per month), paraphrase tool (99,000) and Instagram caption generator (73,000) are particularly popular:

Try it yourself here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools.

We also launched Programmatic SEO campaign, using Ahrefs data to rank the world’s most popular websites:

Localized versions of these pages (especially Swedish and French) account for most of the traffic:

One of Surfshark’s fastest growing pages is Free IP address checking tool:

But interestingly, most of the company’s organic growth comes from branded keywords such as surfshark discount codes, surfshark offers, and Surf Shark Login:

This is a good sign that the company has been investing heavily in brand marketing, with a by-product of increased search queries for the brand.

watching paid search According to reports in Ahrefs, we can see that the company has launched a massive advertising campaign over the past few months (we recorded 876 separate ads):

Large, expensive brand advertising campaigns are uncommon for companies built from scratch.

Although fundraising data indicates that Surfshark has never raised outside funding, their website shares this “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Security merged into a holding company, forming a cybersecurity giant while still operating independently.”

This suggests that Surfshark may not be a true bootstrap (but I kept it because it shows an interesting and expensive way to grow organic traffic).

All of IPQS’s traffic growth (in fact, an estimated 57% of total organic traffic) comes from a single page, i.e. Free tool to find phone numbers:

The page successfully ranks #1 for keywords like phone number lookup (Monthly search volume in the US is 353K), Telephone inquiry (48K), and check this call (35K):

Despite only 84 referrer fields and a design that looks good from around 2005:

final thoughts

We will share more of this analysis in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next round? Just fill out this short Google form.