on a journey to PMF: building something for inbound
if outbound isn't the answer, what can inbound look like
Hey everyone,
I spent most of last week reading about SEO. Outbound didn’t work as I intended it to, so revisiting SEO and how to drive organic traffic in a content marketing world destroyed by AI.
If inbound is going to be the engine that grows Journey from here, SEO is the first step, so I went looking for a plan I’d actually run.
the playbook
Tibo from Outrank published a 90-Day SEO Sprint.
The numbers in it are real. One of his users went from 0 to 29.6K monthly impressions and DR 2.3 to DR 14 in 90 days. Another hit 433 AI Overview citations, 69 ChatGPT mentions, 41 Perplexity hits, running the same plays.
Therefore, a few things have me leaning toward running it.
One — buyer behavior changed. I covered this last week. 67% of B2B buyers want a rep-free experience. 80% finish most of the journey before talking to anyone. If buyers self-serve, they need to find you first. SEO gets your business on the shortlist.
Two — Journey already exists. We’re not launching from zero. We have customers, a domain that’s been around for years, and a real product to point keyword bets at.
Three — the math is reasonable. We get roughly 300 free signups a month right now. If I could double that organically by Day 90, the rest of the funnel doesn’t need to change for MRR to start moving.
what running it would actually look like
foundation (days 1–30)
Tech audit on journey.io: page speed, Core Web Vitals, canonicals, sitemap, schema. Most of it should already be clean. The sprint says check, so I’d check.
Then 20–30 winnable keywords. Only target keywords where the top three results have a domain rating under 50.
digital sales room software
alternatives to docsend
alternatives to dock
investor data room for emerging fund managers
buyer enablement tool
deal room platform for sales
how to track who viewed my pdf
how to share materials with multiple investors
sales collateral platform for SMB
Then three core pages: a homepage that actually says what Journey does in the H1, our highest-intent use-case page, and a first comparison page. Probably Journey vs DocSend.
content engine (days 31–60)
Comparison and alternative pages first. They convert. Tibo’s whole thesis is that founders skip these because they feel salesy — but they’re the highest-intent pages on the internet, and they outrank almost anything for buyers in the market.
The first six I’d build: Journey vs DocSend, Journey vs Dock, Journey vs Aligned, Journey vs BriefLink, Journey vs Highspot, Journey vs Emlen.
Then use-case pages: digital sales room for industrial sales. Investor data room for emerging fund managers. Content delivery for agencies. Each one was written for an ICP we already validated.
Two to three blog posts a week, repurposed into LinkedIn and X.
Backlinks… need to work through the strategy on this one.
authority (days 61–90)
Open GSC. Find every page ranking position 8–20 — these are the fastest wins because Google already thinks they’re relevant. Expand them with depth, FAQ schema, better structure. A page moving from 14 to 4 can triple its traffic overnight.
Build one content cluster — pillar post plus 5-7 supporting posts, all interlinked. Pillar would be “the digital sales room.” Spokes by ICP and use case.
what day 90 would tell me
If I run it, at least I’d know in 90 days whether SEO is the lever or not.
I’m also not sure if this is the right kind of inbound for Journey.
Curious if you run your SEO via a ready-made tool or you’ve built your process from scratch.
That’s where I’m at.
That’s it for this one. Let’s keep it going.
Cheers,
Danny