How Chatbase Added $103K MRR with Just 36 Keywords - SEO Is NOT Dead

0:00Chatbase.co grew organic search traffic 68% in the past 5 months, generating 68,000 clicks from 7.5 million impressions. It played a part in helping them increase monthly recurring revenue by $13,000. That was taken from detail.com's the state of SEO in 2025. And what's especially crazy is chatbase.co isn't even ranking for that many keywords. It's only ranking for 36 keywords in positions one through three on Google and only three keywords in position one. There's a ton of keyword gaps in their space. 68% of their growth, as I'll share in a moment, was due to SEO. And even without ranking for that many keywords with tons of gaps in

0:50their space, they were able to increase MR by $103,000. So, I'm making this episode for those who say there's no opportunity in SEO anymore. If you're one of those people or if you're wondering, you know, is this a good channel? This episode is for you because it's not like this is an outlier that's ranking for tons and tons of keywords. No, it's ranking for, and this according to Moz, 36 keywords in positions 1 through three and 166 keywords in positions 4 through 10. And I'm going to share their rankings more in a moment. First, I'm going to read two tweets from somebody on their team from the marketing and growth lead at

1:31chatbase. And Sandra, she was a rare figure who gave revenue numbers and marketing numbers out publicly on X. A lot of people, you know, they keep this close to their chest and uh maybe she'll regret that after I break down their SEO, but it is an inspiring story. Look, don't go copy chat vape, but I need to share this. There's tons of opportunity in SEO and this is a great story. I think it's less sunny now. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm wearing sunglasses. I'm taking them off. The sun was just shining directly on me as I started recording this, but now it's either I think it's obscured behind some

2:07clouds or the angle has changed just a little bit. That's not directly on my face. Let's go. Sandra said, "We grew MRR from Oh, here we go. total numbers from 392,000 in December to 495,000 in April. Oh my gosh. MRR is four it's almost 500,000 and they're ranking for 36 keywords in positions 1 through three. Only three keywords in position one. 166 keywords in positions

2:394 through 10. Oh my gosh. Please do SEO. It's my favorite channel. Okay. It's my favorite marketing channel. Sandra says, "And we grew this MR with three marketing channels: SEO, paid ads, social media. Here's a full playbook on how we made it happen. Also, don't get discouraged when you hear paid ads. They're not just for scaling. They're great for fast testing. We figured out

3:04how to make them ROI positive quickly. Across all sources, we brought in 798,000 visitors and tracked 14 million events. That's a 14% growth in traffic since the start of the year. We focused on three main levers. SEO, that was 68% of growth. Paid ads, which is Google and Meta, and social. LinkedIn and X, both saw strong organic growth. This wasn't just about revenue. It was fullfunnel growth across awareness, interest, and engagement. Let's start with the most complicated SEO. In December, we

3:39launched AI agents for customer support. that positioned chatbase as a go-to tool for customer experience. But SEO got harder, not easier. We had to move from broad chatbot content to focused articles that matched real search intent. That actually makes it easier because niched down keywords typically are less competitive. But anyway, Sandra continues, "We also began tracking competitor content. If they're ranked, we made sure to rank better. That's one of the reasons you should track your keywords and track your keywords against competitors because you can see if competitors are increasing ranks for the keywords that you are going after. Or you can see that competitors have quickly lost a position. Then you can go

4:21in and see what's up. Sandra continues with the SEO. Here's what we saw. 168,000 clicks, 7.5 million impressions, 68% increase in organic traffic. Paid ads, Google and Meta. This became a key top offunnel driver, but we had to rebuild everything. Our old chatbot messaging no longer worked. We repositioned around AI agents, tested new keywords, and rebuilt landing pages. We had some great weeks, including 339

4:52total subscriptions just in January. Facebook ads performed well after remarketing and middle of funnel adjustments. Social media, this only worked because we treated it seriously. LinkedIn company page grew from 18,000 to 21,000 followers. The best combination organic posts plus targeted ads. Ads helped us refine our ideal customer profile. Organic drove the most reach. X Twitter from 300 to 1.8,000 followers in 3 months. Fully organic blog drops, product updates, zero spend, just consistent storytelling and useful content. If you're trying to scale with a small team, this approach works. Now, with workflows, I want to double all of these numbers. Sandra follows up. She

5:38says, "Just dropping some thoughts here. Chatbase is bootstrapped. 11 people, no venture capital, no sales team. We grew from 392,000 to 495,000 monthly recurring revenue in 4 months. About 6% month overmonth growth. Now, if you look at software as a service benchmarks, if you look at SAS benchmarks, 0 to 10,000 MR, 10 to 20% month-over-month, 10,000 to 100,000 MR, 5 to 15%, 100,000 to 500,000, 3 to 10%, and 500,000 plus 2 to 5%. Most companies slow down as they scale. The numbers just get harder to move, but we're still growing above average. Thank you again, Sandra, for sharing that. So, like I said, they have 36 keywords in positions

6:321 through three, 166 keywords in positions 4 through 10. And I know I always say on this show, don't focus on blog SEO. Well, they're doing blog SEO. The reason I say don't focus on blog SEO is not because it doesn't work. I mean, sometimes it doesn't work. It's getting more and more disrupted by AI. People

6:50are taking their questions to AI. they're clicking less because of AI overviews or Google's new AI mode. But the real reason I say don't do blog SEO is because bottom offunnel SEO landing pages, they're just a lot more efficient. With that said, blog SEO still works. And using the bottom offunnel targeting that I always share on this show, which is address search intent really specifically, take your keyword, put it in your page title, URL slug, metad description, H1, beginning of your first sentence. give people what

7:20they want before they start scrolling. By doing that stuff with blog SEO, you can still crush. You can still crush with blog SEO. With that said, bottom ofunnel SEO landing pages, they take a lot less work. They target people who are looking to buy right now versus people who are going to a blog and trying to get answers and they're not sure that they want to take action. They take less work. They take less backlinks. They take less words per page. They're straight up easier. But

7:45anyway, tons of opportunity in SEO. Chatbase is doing it with blog SEO. And honestly, especially if you find undertargeted keywords that are top offunnel and have a lot of traffic, but again, they're undertargeted, totally use a blog to rank for it. It's not going to take that much work in terms of link building because it's undertargeted. You target it well, you'll rank one, you'll get tons of traffic. That's actually a lot of what Chatbase has done. Their keywords are

8:15not very competitive. It's crazy. They're in such a lucrative space. Their keywords are not very competitive and they're making blog posts going after them. An example of bottomfunnel SEO compared to blog SEO. This comes from Shoot, the founders of Chute. They came on this show a few weeks ago. That was episode 651 of this show. Apple crushed their ads, so they learned SEO and hit 10 million annual recurring revenue. And yeah, they're at 10 million annual recurring revenue doing a lot of SEO, ranking for ranking number one for things like photo shoot NYC, Chicago photo shoot, photo shoot Los Angeles, keywords like that. They have these

8:54super short pages where you can just right there before you even start scrolling, you can just book a photo shoot with the photographer. They have a cool business model where you don't pay until you choose the photos that you want. I think you have to put a deposit, but but right there before you even start scrolling, you can just click into a calendar and they're doing programmatic SEO, too. So, they have this scaled across cities in the United States, and they're targeting much more bottom offunnel keywords like Photoshoot NYC, ranking number one. They're doing it without a blog, and they're at 10 million annual recurring revenue, 1

9:31million net annual revenue. Blog SEO can be great, especially if the keywords are they have good traffic and they're undertargeted, but like really especially if they're undertargeted. And then you can just use the same targeting that I always advise for these bottom offunnel SEO landing pages, which is take your keyword, put it in your page title, URL slug, meta description, H1, beginning of your first sentence, give visitors what they want before they even have to start scrolling, before they even scroll. will give them it above the fold. And if you do that with blog SEO, you're going to do really well. Let's go back to chatbase. Here are the keywords

10:10that they rank number one for. And it's only three. Catabase. I don't even know what chatabase is. It sounds like a branded term. Maybe that maybe they changed their name or no, I think chatabase is like a legacy tool. I'm not I'm not sure. But they rank number one for that. They rank number one for CRM with conversational bot. And then they rank number one for train your own chat

10:32GPT. They're doing that with blog SEO. They have this post/blog/crm- chatbot that's ranking for tons of different keywords. They are going heavy with blog SEO. They have a lot of blog posts. It's a lot of the time you might see one of these one of these companies and a lot of their SEO is just all coming from one blog post, but their SEO is going to many different blog posts. B2B chat bots, how to train chat GPT, chatbot development tools, open-source chatbot platforms. So, they're going hard with blog SEO and the articles are very lengthy and very well researched. I'm looking into 21 best open-source chatbot platforms to try in

11:202025. And what's funny is they don't even put themselves in this list of 21 companies. They just write at the top summary by chatbased AI. Explore 21 open-source chatbot platforms for 2025. Options like Raza Bot Press and Microsoft Bot Framework offer flexibility and control. Consider Chatbase for a noode managed solution. choose based on your needs, skills, and scalability. Open-source offers customization, but requires more technical expertise. And so, they position themselves, I guess, against this, and they do that right at the top of the post. Here's a keyword that they rank number two for, chatbot integration agency. What's so crazy about this search engine results page, is nobody is

12:06optimizing for this keyword properly. In fact, their homepage ranks number two for chatbot integration agency. There is nobody who is putting chatbot integration agency in their page title, nor anybody who's putting it in their URL slug. The two most important places to place your keyword are the page title and the URL slug. Nobody is doing that here. This is wide open. In fact, one of the results on page one for this keyword has a 12 out of 100 domain authority. So these these keywords are wide open. This is crazy. Another keyword. This is chatbots in CRM. Chatbase is ranking number two for this with their blog CRM-

12:49chatbot. Surprise, surprise. The number one ranking is very well optimized for this keyword. Literally the page title for the number one rank for the number one result is chatbots in CRM systems and the URL slug is chatbots-in-cls. So it's very well optimized and then it ranks number one and it actually has less domain authority than chatbase. Last keyword I want to I want to look into CRM with conversational bot. Chatbase is ranking number one for this and they're doing that with their with the same blog post CRM- chatbot, but it's not even a well optimized page, which is why I'm saying there's just so many opportunities in

13:33this space. Holy moly. And their MR is nearly 500,000. Probably now it's past 500,000. Their monthly recurring revenue is probably past 500,000. their increase of $130,000, 68% due to SEO. They're not even ranking for that many keywords. There's just tons of opportunity. And you know, as more and more people say SEO is dead, or they wonder, is this a good channel and maybe I'll do social instead, there's going to continue to be less competition. And there's new

14:08products emerge and new niches emerge. there's all these keywords in these new niches that now there's not as many SEO is optimizing for. So the the markets are more open, the search engine results pages are more open. I don't know. I think this is so cool. I believe anybody can do this. So I hope you will try to do something like this, too. And that's all that I have for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 690. Wow. of my daily digital marketing

14:38show. 690 days in a row doing this show. When I started this episode, this the sun was shining bright on my face and now it is perfect. It is perfect in my home. Perfect sitting here recording. I hope you have a fantastic Sunday. I'm about to go out. I'm going to go to a cafe. I'm going to sit. I'm going to write today's newsletter. You can get that at edwardtorm.com/newsletter. And to all those watching and listening, I will

15:03talk to you again tomorrow. B.