Huntr.co, a bootstrapped startup with just seven people on the team, achieved a staggering 5,000% increase in organic traffic in under a year, all without venture funding.
Competing in a saturated job-tech space dominated by VC-backed giants, they managed to grow from just 4,000 blog sessions to over 220,000 within twelve months, purely through content-driven SEO.
I spoke with Sam, Head of Partnerships, and Nicole, Product Marketing Manager at Huntr to understand how they built a scalable, repeatable content engine by pairing AI with human editors.
“We love Surfer for content freshness, keyword research, and to help with writer's block. We have more than 2x'd our blog content production and decreased the cost to produce SEO content by more than 4x.
So double the content at a quarter of the price. As a bootstrapped AI startup this is huge for us.”
– Sam Wright, Head of Partnerships at Huntr.co
They walked me through how they’re using Surfer to templatize pages for thousands of job titles, consistently refresh high-performing pages, and publish high-quality articles in a very competitive niche.
You'll gain actionable insights applicable immediately, whether you're a startup founder, content marketer, or in-house SEO.
1. Scale templatized pages for thousands of job titles
Huntr generated resume examples for hundreds of job titles, allowing them to show up for job seekers in virtually every domain.
To do this efficiently, Sam and Nicole worked with content writers who used Surfer to write and optimize large volumes of content.
“Our content is a mix of content written solely by humans and with a human-in-the-loop AI system. Surfer’s tools increase our productivity so we can scale our content.”
– Sam Wright, Head of Partnerships at Huntr.co
This allowed Huntr to combine automation with human expertise, where AI generated drafts were refined by experienced writers to ensure high quality and readability at scale.
The team maintained quality and originality through a balance of AI drafts and human editing, ensuring their articles do not read like AI-only articles.
They’ve since extended the same strategy to other content hubs like interview question pages, helping Huntr establish itself as an authority in the highly competitive job search space.
Surfer AI’s templates can help you scale content by using AI to generate pages based on custom templates.
For example, here I’m using a comparison page template to differentiate between Calendly and Google Calendar.
As you can see, the draft is pretty good and already optimized for SEO, but I’ll still spend some time editing and humanizing it to ensure the content matches the voice I want.
You can use this process to create pages for all of Calendly’s competitors.
2. Frequent content updates helped maintain SERP positions
Sam and his team used Surfer's recommendations to keep their content current. They did this by updating existing pages with new information and FAQs, ensuring the content remained timely, relevant, and valuable for users.
“We actively do content freshness on older articles, landing pages, and even on our programmatic pages to ensure we’re always up-to-date and relevant to our customers and website visitors.”
– Sam Wright, Head of Partnerships at Huntr.co
Updating content frequently is an often overlooked way to keep growing traffic. Surfer’s Recommendations can help you identify which pages are outdated and require attention.
Use the Score column to prioritize your pages.
For Huntr, staying fresh across content has helped its reputation and standing with search engines.
3. Using AI to 10x content workflow
Huntr’s marketing team only consists of three people, but was able to achieve results of a much larger team with the help of AI.
“We are laser-focused on high-quality content in underserved niches. We are tactical and lean in focusing on keyword support results.”
– Sam Wright, Head of Partnerships at Huntr.co
They’re using Surfer’s AI tools through their content production workflow, from keyword research to optimization, without losing sight of the human element.
Marketing manager, Nicole, who previously worked at Shopify shares insider insights based on her wide interviewing experience, adding to website’s content’s credibility and connecting with job seekers, their target audience.
Using a hybrid model of AI generated content and human oversight allowed them to increase content production rapidly without sacrificing editorial standards.
This approach allows Huntr to leverage AI's efficiency and scalability without compromising the human creativity and narrative power essential for authoritative industry content.
Results
Huntr launched their blog just last year and have experienced remarkable growth in organic traffic within a short timeframe.
Comparing January to June year-over-year, they saw sessions increase by approximately 5,000%.
Their analytics snapshot shows substantial organic growth from about 4000 sessions initially to over 220,000 sessions in the same period the following year.
Huntr’s results are particularly impressive given their context: they’re a small, bootstrapped team operating in a hyper-competitive space dominated by companies 10 times their size with deep VC funding.
“We are focused on delivering a high-qualty product to customers in a crowded space and that starts with great content. Our hustle, empathy, and thoughtfulness are our edge.”
– Sam Wright, Head of Partnerships at Huntr.co
Unlike larger competitors with massive marketing budgets, Sam and his team had to be scrappy, maximizing limited resources and relying on relentless execution rather than scale.
The fact that they achieved a 5,000% increase in traffic within a year is proof that SEO can be a significant lever for smaller businesses in competitive industries.
You can have similarly impressive results for your business with Surfer’s AI tools. Take a look here.
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