50 Bootstrapped SaaS Companies Dominating SEO in 2024
In this article, we’re focusing on bootstrapped software companies—those who have never raised external funding. All SEO data featured here comes piping hot from the Ahrefs API. This is a list of bootstrapped SaaS companies ordered by estimated monthly...
Koichiko
We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024. In this article, we’re focusing on bootstrapped software companies—those who have never raised external funding. All SEO data featured here comes piping hot from the Ahrefs API. This is a list of bootstrapped SaaS companies ordered by estimated monthly organic traffic growth from August 2023 to August 2024. Did you make the cut? For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand the SEO strategies driving their growth. In a nutshell: free tools, programmatic content, and content localization feature heavily. Smallpdf offers free tools for editing and converting PDF files. They have an estimated annual revenue of $17,500,000. Smallpdf’s traffic growth comes entirely from—you guessed it—free PDF tools. Conversion tools (converting from PDF to Word Doc, from JPG to PDF, and so on) drive the majority of the site’s traffic: These free tools target extremely high volume keywords, like pdf to word with an estimated 3.9M searches in Indonesia alone. Here’s the actual page that ranks so well: These tools have also been localized to different languages, with the Spanish-, Indonesian- and Portuguese-targeted subfolders generating a large portion of the website’s traffic growth: BuiltWith is a tool for discovering the technologies companies use to use to build their websites. BuiltWith has an estimated annual revenue of $31,000,000. The biggest single driver of BuiltWith’s growth is the addition of a Korean language subfolder, builtwith.com/ko, housing localized versions of 191 website pages: Other language subfolders (particularly /de, /es, and /fr) also generate a decent amount of 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. We don’t need conjecture here. Our free AI writing tools are responsible for a big part of our organic traffic growth: Our paragraph rewriter (113k visits per month), paraphrasing tool (99k), and instagram caption generator (73k) are particularly popular: Try them out for yourselves here: https://ahrefs.com/writing-tools. We also launched a programmatic SEO campaign, using Ahrefs data to rank the world’s most popular websites: The localized versions of these pages—particularly Swedish and French—account for the majority of the traffic: Surfshark is a VPN tool with an estimated annual revenue of $20,000,000. One of Surfshark’s fastest-growing pages is a free IP address checking tool: But interestingly, most of the company’s organic growth has come from branded keywords, like surfshark discount code, surfshark deals, and surfshark login: This is a good indication that the company has been investing heavily in brand marketing, increasing branded search queries as a byproduct. Looking at the Paid search reports in Ahrefs, we can see that the company launched a substantial advertising campaign in the last couple of months (we’ve logged 876 separate ads): Big, expensive brand advertising campaigns are not common for bootstrapped companies. Although the fundraising data suggests that Surfshark has never raised outside capital, their website shares that “In 2022, Surfshark and Nord Security merged under one holding company to form a cybersecurity powerhouse while still operating independently.” This suggests that Surfshark may not be bootstrapped in the truest sense (but I’ve left it in because it showcases an interesting—and expensive—way to grow organic traffic). IPQS is a fraud, bot detection, and IP validation tool with an estimated annual revenue of $32,000,000. All of IPQS’ traffic growth (and in fact, 57% of their total estimated organic traffic) comes from a single page, a free tool for looking up phone numbers: This page manages to rank in first place for keywords like phone number lookup (353K monthly searches in the US), phone lookup (48K), and check this phone (35K): This, despite just 84 referring domains and a design that probably looked good circa 2005: We’ll share more of these analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next round? Just fill out this short Google Form.RankCompanyTraffic 2023Traffic 2024Traffic GrowthChangeEstimated Revenue 1 Smallpdf 41,145,810 55,455,141 14,309,331 35% $17.5M 2 BuiltWith 526,880 3,149,986 2,623,106 498% $31.0M 3 Ahrefs 2,171,168 4,271,413 2,100,245 97% $100.0M 4 Surfshark 992,020 1,510,739 518,719 52% $20.0M 5 IPQS 1,194,124 1,660,482 466,358 39% $32.0M 6 ExpressVPN 1,620,815 1,927,577 306,762 19% $14.9M 7 OpenWeather 203,917 470,687 266,770 131% $5.5M 8 Clockify 600,071 859,005 258,934 43% $5.5M 9 BambooHR 652,833 808,660 155,827 24% $237.8M 10 Surfer 45,197 189,261 144,064 319% $37.5M 11 Doofinder 55,317 184,746 129,429 234% $75.0M 12 Oxylabs.io 92,671 207,640 114,969 124% $375.0M 13 Todoist 545,900 639,398 93,498 17% $20.3M 14 Toggl 295,570 388,062 92,492 31% $14.7M 15 JetBrains 2,712,320 2,796,818 84,498 3% $252.1M 16 Zadarma 130,940 214,538 83,598 64% $175.0M 17 MXToolbox 738,595 802,633 64,038 9% $9.0M 18 TeamGantt 120,783 176,899 56,116 46% $5.0M 19 Mailtrap 103,564 156,873 53,309 51% $5.5M 20 GetResponse 192,850 243,514 50,664 26% $129.2M 21 DeviceAtlas 59,267 109,341 50,074 84% $19.0M 22 Elfsight 65,359 104,938 39,579 61% $8.0M 23 Vector Magic 169,389 199,343 29,954 18% $10.0M 24 Referral Factory 943 27,591 26,648 2826% $5.5M 25 Crowdin 17,602 43,155 25,553 145% $17.5M 26 Kaspr 10,476 33,515 23,039 220% $5.5M 27 Wisepops 13,698 36,295 22,597 165% $3.0M 28 SavyCal 11,926 33,984 22,058 185% $5.5M 29 Voucherify 37,111 58,832 21,721 59% $5.5M 30 Buzzsprout 97,961 118,040 20,079 21% $617K 31 Meeting Room 365 5,738 25,637 19,899 347% $500K 32 vFairs 18,175 37,812 19,637 108% $75.0M 33 Helpjuice 73,249 92,177 18,928 26% $6.0M 34 Yardi 64,177 81,896 17,719 28% $5.5B 35 SpyFu 62,410 79,361 16,951 27% $2.0M 36 Wappalyzer 61,561 78,303 16,742 27% $500K 37 Filemail 142,226 158,133 15,907 11% $1.0M 38 Float.com 29,088 44,737 15,649 54% $5.5M 39 Free online HTML editor 29,523 44,269 14,746 50% - 40 BrightLocal 🇺🇦 52,853 66,876 14,023 27% $10.3M 41 ShortPixel 6,192 20,006 13,814 223% $10.0M 42 GetMyInvoices 10,880 23,767 12,887 118% $5.5M 43 Mangools 67,615 80,324 12,709 19% $5.5M 44 La Growth Machine 13,668 26,321 12,653 93% $5.5M 45 Aha! 135,156 147,570 12,414 9% $100.0M 46 GTranslate Inc. 7,739 20,125 12,386 160% $5.3M 47 Slickplan 13,270 24,857 11,587 87% $1.0M 48 Uptime.com 28,164 39,394 11,230 40% $5.5M 49 Homerun 23,049 33,883 10,834 47% $38.4M 50 Glassnode 13,321 24,111 10,790 81% $5.5M Top 5 bootstrapped SaaS companies
Smallpdf20232024Absolute changePercent change Organic traffic 41,145,810 55,455,141 14,309,331 34.78% Organic pages 3,367 3,506 139 4.13% Organic keywords 466,048 416,115 -49,933 -10.71% Keywords in top 3 54,933 69,359 14,426 26.26% 
BuiltWith20232024Absolute changePercent change Organic traffic 526,880 3,149,986 2,623,106 497.86% Organic pages 81,615 93,716 12,101 14.83% Organic keywords 126,541 111,371 -15,170 -11.99% Keywords in top 3 4,538 4,307 -231 -5.09% 
Ahrefs20232024Absolute changePercent change Organic traffic 2,171,168 4,271,413 2,100,245 96.73% Organic pages 4,522 18,982 14,460 319.77% Organic keywords 225,855 231,761 5,906 2.61% Keywords in top 3 14,291 20,618 6,327 44.27% 
Surfshark20232024Absolute changePercent change Organic traffic 992,020 1,510,739 518,719 52.29% Organic pages 2,610 3,964 1,354 51.88% Organic keywords 205,194 248,267 43,073 20.99% Keywords in top 3 5,359 9,390 4,031 75.22% 
IPQS20232024Absolute changePercent change Organic traffic 1,194,124 1,660,482 466,358 39.05% Organic pages 22,378 31,350 8,972 40.09% Organic keywords 72,181 75,390 3,209 4.45% Keywords in top 3 5,092 7,065 1,973 38.75% 
Final thoughts
