Project overview
Basmo is a reading tracker app that helps people build a reading habit through personal goals, progress tracking and reading insights.
- Goal: Build a sustainable organic traffic channel, reduce customer acquisition costs, and strengthen online authority
- My role: Led SEO and content end to end, from technical SEO to launching new organic growth channels
Situation and challenge
When I joined Basmo in June 2021, the company relied heavily on paid installs and had little organic visibility. At that time:
Organic footprint: Fewer than 1,000 monthly users, fewer than 100 keywords ranked in Google’s top 10, and just ~70 referring domains.
Business pain: Rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) and the need to build a sustainable organic traffic channel ahead of new funding rounds.
Technical risk: Basmo had just migrated to a new domain, and the rankings and traffic needed immediate SEO work to protect them.
The job: turn a small organic footprint into a channel that could keep growing, in several languages, without depending on paid installs.
Strategy and execution
I built and ran a content and SEO strategy centred on well-researched, keyword-targeted blog articles. Over 200 were published, covering both trending and evergreen topics in Basmo’s niche.
Key initiatives:
Oversaw the SEO side of Basmo’s domain migration: URL mapping, 301 redirects, internal linking and technical audits to preserve search performance.
Launched a complete SEO and content strategy from scratch, focused on long-term organic growth.
Built and scaled the blog, publishing 200+ SEO-optimized articles targeting strategic keywords.
Expanded the SEO framework across five languages, localizing and optimizing over 200 articles for international markets.
Supervised all technical SEO, improving site structure, internal linking and page speed.
Developed the Discover Basmo content hub, a curated database of book lists and entries that built topical authority and captured high-intent traffic.
Results
The results went well past the original goals:
Scaled organic traffic from 1,000 to over 100,000 monthly users, bringing in users without heavy spending on paid ads.
Expanded the site’s authority with backlinks from over 1,200 referring domains.
Evolution of organic traffic and referring domains from Ahrefs
Grew monthly Google impressions from 30,000 to over 8 million.
Evolution of clicks and impressions in Google Search Console
Reached 40,000+ keyword rankings, including 2,000+ top 3 positions for competitive terms like “book tracker”, “best book apps”, “benefits of reading books” and “what is booktok”.
Evolution of keywords in Ahrefs
Top keywords in Ahrefs
Top keywords in Google Search Console
Drove tens of thousands of readers a month to the top-performing pages.
Top pages in Ahrefs
Top pages in Google Search Console
Impact
Basmo went from a little-known startup to one of the most visible names in reading and productivity search, with organic growth across several languages that no longer depended on paid installs.