How I ranked Slashit App with my biggest competitor's name and made it my best traffic source
In April, my SaaS had zero organic traffic. Not "low." Zero. A domain, a landing page, and a product nobody was searching for.
In July, it pulled 7.3K website visitors in 30 days. All of it from Google. No ads, no launch, no influencer deal, no growth hack.
The whole thing runs on 12 articles.
That's the part people don't believe. Not twelve hundred. Not a programmatic SEO farm spitting out ten thousand doorway pages. Twelve articles, written one at a time, most of them in a single sitting.
I want to walk through exactly how that happened, because the mechanism is boring, repeatable, and almost nobody building a SaaS in 2026 is doing it. Everyone is posting. Almost nobody is publishing.
Why posting on X will never do what an article does
I like X. It's where I found most of the people I work with. But I want to be clear about what it is and what it isn't.
A post is a flare. An article is a building.
A post gets its lifetime traffic in about 48 hours. It spikes, it dies, and its value drops to roughly zero. To get the same result next week, you post again. And again. Forever. The day you stop, the traffic stops with you.
An article works on the opposite clock. It does nothing for weeks. Then it starts ranking, and it keeps working while you sleep, while you ship, while you're on vacation, and — this is the part that matters — it keeps working two years from now.
My April articles are still bringing visitors in July. I haven't touched them. I don't have to be online for them to work. That's the difference between renting attention and owning an asset.
If you're a solo founder or a small team, you can't out-post the internet. You will lose that fight on volume. But you can absolutely out-publish your competitors, because most of them have decided that SEO is dead and content is a waste of time.
Which brings me to the actual play.
The mistake almost every SaaS founder makes with content
When founders finally decide to "do content," they write about themselves.
- "Introducing our new dashboard"
- "Why we built [product]"
- "5 productivity tips" (with the product mentioned six times)
- "What is [category]?"
I've written all of these. They get nothing. And it took me too long to understand why.
Nobody is searching for your product. They don't know it exists.
You are trying to create demand from scratch, which requires a budget you don't have. Demand creation is what companies with a marketing department do. You need something else.
You need to borrow demand that already exists.
The play: rank for the competitor everyone already knows
Here is the single highest-leverage article I published:
"Best Raycast Alternatives for Text Snippets & Fast Typing"
Read that title again, because every word in it is doing a job.
Raycast is a big, well-funded, well-known company. They have spent real money and real years making people aware that their category exists. Thousands of people type their name into Google every single day.
I did not spend a dollar to create that awareness. I just showed up where it already lives.
That's the entire trick. You are not competing with the big company. You are standing next to them.
Why "alternatives" searches are the best traffic on the internet
Think about what a person is actually doing when they search "[big product] alternatives."
They are not curious. They are not learning. They already know the category, they already understand the problem, and they have already decided they want a tool. They are searching for alternatives because something about the leader doesn't fit — price, platform, complexity, one missing feature.
That is a person with a credit card in their hand looking for a reason to switch.
Compare that to somebody searching "how to type faster." That person might be a student, a hobbyist, someone killing time. Ten times the search volume, a fraction of the value.
High-intent traffic beats high-volume traffic every time. I would rather have 200 visitors who are shopping than 20,000 who are browsing.
The modifier is where the whole thing is won
Now look at the second half of my title: "for Text Snippets & Fast Typing."
If I had published "Best Raycast Alternatives" on its own, I would be fighting every review site, every affiliate blog, and every publication with a hundred-domain backlink profile. I'd lose. My domain is new. I have no authority. That fight isn't winnable yet.
But "Raycast alternatives for text snippets" is a different query entirely. It's narrower, it's specific, and here's the important part: it's the exact slice of the market where my product is genuinely the better answer.
So the formula I keep reusing is:
[Big Competitor] + Alternatives + [The Specific Use Case Where You Actually Win]
Not the use case where you want to win. The one where you already do. If you pick a modifier where the competitor is stronger than you, you'll rank and then bounce every visitor straight back to them. You'll have done free marketing for a company that doesn't know your name.
The rules I follow writing these pages
This is the part worth saving. Twelve articles taught me more than any SEO course I've paid for.
1. Answer the question in the first 100 words. Not after a 400-word intro about the history of productivity software. Somebody landed on your page asking "what should I use instead of X?" Tell them, immediately, in a sentence. Google rewards it, readers reward it, and AI assistants pulling an answer from your page will pull that sentence.
2. Be honest about where the competitor wins. This feels wrong the first time. Do it anyway. When I write "if you need [thing Raycast does better], stay with Raycast," two things happen: the reader trusts everything else I say, and the person who stays wasn't going to convert anyway. Fake objectivity is transparent, and it's the fastest way to make somebody close the tab.
3. One page per competitor, per use case. Do not write "Top 15 Alternatives to Everything." That page ranks for nothing because it's about nothing. Narrow pages rank. Broad pages sit on page four.
4. Put a real comparison table on the page. Actual features, actual pricing, actual platform support. Tables get pulled into search results. They also get quoted by AI tools, which increasingly matters more than the blue link.
5. Write it so a machine can quote one paragraph and be correct. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — they're all answering "what's a good alternative to X?" right now, today, for thousands of people. They lift self-contained, factual paragraphs. If your page only makes sense read top to bottom, it never gets quoted. Every section should stand alone.
6. Use question-shaped headings. "Is [competitor] worth the price?" beats "Pricing." It matches how people actually search and how assistants actually parse.
7. Publish on your own domain. Not Medium. Not a Notion page. Not only in an X article. The compounding only happens if the authority accrues to you.
8. Link the articles to each other. Twelve articles that link to each other is a small site. Twelve orphan pages is twelve lonely documents. This costs nothing and most people skip it.
9. Stop chasing search volume. I have pages targeting keywords with a few hundred searches a month. They convert better than anything else on the site. Volume is a vanity metric. Intent is the real one.
What twelve articles actually buys you (and how long it takes)
I want to set expectations honestly, because the "0 to 7.3K" framing makes it sound faster than it was.
April: nothing. I published and watched a flat line. This is where most people quit, and I understand why — you're doing work with no feedback whatsoever.
May: the flat line twitches. A few visitors. Impressions climbing in Search Console even though clicks aren't. This is the signal that matters, and it's the one beginners ignore because it doesn't look like traffic yet.
June: pages start finding their positions. Not the pages I expected. The ones I thought were my best performed averagely, and one I almost didn't publish took off.
July: 7.3K in 30 days.
Roughly 90 days from publishing to real traffic. That's the number to plan around. If you start today and check the numbers in three weeks and conclude SEO doesn't work, you didn't test SEO. You tested your own patience.
And notice what I didn't do during those 90 days: I didn't build backlinks, I didn't do outreach, I didn't buy anything. I published, linked the pages together, and left them alone.
The question everybody asks next
I know exactly what you're thinking, because it's the first thing everybody asks me.
"Okay, but does it actually convert? How much revenue is that traffic worth?"
I do have that number. I've been tracking it since the first visitor landed.
I'm not going to put it in this article, and I want to tell you why rather than just being coy about it: the raw number is meaningless without the context around it — the pricing, the trial mechanics, which of the 12 pages carry it, and how uneven the distribution is. One number stripped of that would either wildly oversell this or wildly undersell it, and I'd rather do neither.
Ask me and I'll give you the real breakdown. I'd rather answer it properly than turn it into a headline.
What I will say is this: the traffic from an "alternatives" page converts at a rate that made me stop treating content as a nice-to-have and start treating it as the primary channel. Everything else I do now is downstream of that decision.
If you're starting from zero this week
Here's the compressed version. Save this part.
1. List every competitor bigger than you. Especially the ones you feel intimidated by. Their brand awareness is your distribution.
2. For each one, find the specific use case where you genuinely beat them. Be brutal here. One real advantage is worth more than five imaginary ones.
3. Write Best [Competitor] Alternatives for [Your Use Case]. One page. One competitor. One angle.
4. Answer the question in the first paragraph, then build a comparison table.
5. Say plainly where the competitor is still the better choice.
6. Publish on your own domain and link it to your other pages.
7. Repeat 11 more times over the next three months.
8. Do not check your rankings daily. Check monthly. Look at impressions before clicks.
That's it. That's the whole system. There's no secret tool, no agency, no budget line.
Twelve articles. Four months. 7,300 visitors a month, compounding, that I will never have to pay for again.
The uncomfortable truth is that this works precisely because everyone decided content was dead and went back to posting. The competition left. The demand didn't.
