Domain authority of plugins.carrd.co

Twitter friend @philkellr offered to do a breakdown of your startup’s SEO strategy, so I offered plugins.carrd.co for it. And what he found out were super interesting and insightful!

Domain authority

• Moz.com says the domain authority of my site is 82! That’s very high, but there’s a bit of confusion over whether that’s the DR for the main carrd.co domain, because it’s the same. Maybe the subdomain should be lower since it theoretically can’t be that a subdomain has the same DR as the main. @dqmonn it should be only around 15. Using the subdomain is an unconventional choice but it works so far. No impetus to switch to my own domain yet…
   
  
   

Key words

• “You rank #1 for carrd plugins and carrd widgets - it’s not exactly high volume but could lead to a lot of signups as your page is a good answer to their search query.” This I knew for some time. The first page of Google results for “carrd plugins” are 70-80% my links. That was what led me to conclude that the market might be small and therefore hard to grow fast, or beyond a certain size. I also just realised the being on almost every social media platform is helping too - my recently started profile pages on Tumblr, Youtube and Pinterest are on 5th, 6th and 7th on the first page of Google results! All the times when someone on Twitter told me that unless I can spend lots of time engaging on these platforms, there’s no point starting. Back at ya!
   
  
   
• Another twitter friend @dqmonn shared that I only rank for 5 key words which isn’t much. I could try to rank for the more popular Carrd keywords like “carrd templates” and “carrd tutorials”. I think my recent approach of including “template” in all my plugin demo pages should help in that. I should also add “template” to ALL the older plugin pages. The “carrd tutorial” key words shows that I should really get serious about my blog or some tutorial asset, because that’s what I do so often already helping others!

Page speed/performance

• My Lighthouse performance score is 74% - “which is a tad low (maybe >80% would be good?)” But SEO and accessibility scores are good. The AWS infrastructure behind Carrd is great to start with, so this helped a lot without me doing much. The main causes of lag are the images I upload - have to continue to use compressed pngs and gifs.

Back links

• “You’re prominent on twitter - which lead to a few interviews which lead to backlinks.” I knew from my analytics that my Twitter following does help somewhat with traffic, though conversion is probably low as many from Twitter audience are probably other indie hackers not using Carrd much. But good to know it does help with backlinks (and therefore domain authority). I also often wondered if filling out those random interviews helped at all, so it’s great to know they did!
• “You have your own other sites (substack et al) you link from - nice.” This shows why having a portfolio of products means one product can cross-promote and amplify another. I often write about my plugins project here on Lifelog, and on Substack. I have a Sheet2Bio site, profile page on Makerlog and WIP, and also my name domain jasonleow.com links a list of my projects.
• “Then you also bought some domain names pluginsforcaard etc. which you link to your plugin subdomain which gives some SEO juice.” I’m surprised that Phil could detect I bought those typo domain names that link back to the main site! But nice to know those helped. Using Moz tool that Phil introduced, I also discovered more typos that I could buy domains for, like “pluginsforccard”, “pluginsforcardco”, “pluginsforcard.co”.
• “Then as for backlinks - you invested a lot in this. Launched on producthunt which always is advisable. Then put yourself into lots of directories e.g. linktree… The only way to improve this is to reach out to some website owners and get some backlinks from your niche. Otherwise I don’t see much to improve here.” Yes, this had been my SEO strategy so far this year. A few months ago, managed to score a sponsorship with Carrd influencer @lovjbini, and now just sponsored a $19/m ad on yet another prominent Carrd templates site - templates.carrd.co by @alxandrws. Slowly but surely, I want to get good back links on prominent Carrd sites.

Tl;dr on what i can do next

To-dos!

• launch on Product Hunt
• Add site to more directories
• Get backlinks from other sites
• Improve lighthouse
• Rank for more key words, e.g. set up blog/directory, change copy

Conclusion

Tbh when it comes to SEO I just try stuff. And I’ve tried almost everything on my plugins site. Most of what @philkellr observed about my site were NOT part of an intentional plan haha 😅

But therein lies the true insight. It’s hard to know what works until you try stuff, let it run for a while, and then double down. Marketers on Twitter always advise you should focus on just 1-2 distribution channels, but truth is, you won’t know until you tried more small bets in terms of channels!