Your landing page isn’t the funnel, intent is
When you build a startup, it is easy to fall in love with your own product. The landing page looks slick. The app feels polished. In your head, it seems obvious people should be showing up. Then reality hits. No traffic, no users, no momentum. You start wondering how something that feels so good can still feel invisible.
That was my wake up call with Brzzy Weather. I thought if I built a great weather app and optimized around “weather app” search, people would find me. Instead, I got humbled fast. I was basically a nothing burger buried deep in Google, somewhere around page five, and most people searching never make it past the top few results. It made me realize that having a product is not the same thing as having a funnel.
So I changed the way I thought about search. Instead of trying to force people into my app through broad keywords owned by giants, I started thinking about what people actually need help with. My app has activity ratings for all kinds of outdoor things, so I built SEO pages around those real life moments. Questions like whether the weather is good for cycling, if today is a good day to mow the grass, or what kind of forecast makes for a perfect run. I stopped chasing generic weather traffic and started chasing intent.
Then I pushed it further by creating a weather glossary. I built pages around weather terms people search when they are confused, curious, or trying to understand what they are seeing outside. Things like haze, drizzle, humidity, wind chill, and severe weather alerts. Every search became a chance to help someone first, instead of immediately trying to sell them an app.
That shift changed everything for me. The Weather Channel and AccuWeather can dominate “what’s the weather” searches all day long, but they do not own every reason people care about the weather. Most people are not searching for weather just because they love weather. They are searching because they want to know if they should go on a bike ride, mow the lawn, head to the beach, or prepare for something coming. That is where I realized the opportunity was.
The biggest lesson was simple. People usually are not searching for your product. They are searching for their problem. Once I understood that, I stopped treating SEO like a vanity game and started using it like a real funnel. My landing page did not need to be more beautiful. I needed to meet people where their intent already lived.
Really like this framing — especially the “intent > page” shift.
Curious — how do you personally figure out what intent to go after before building or writing anything?
That’s something I’ve found surprisingly hard — knowing what people actually care about vs what just looks interesting.
Really like this framing.
Feels like a lot of people stop at getting the click, but the same idea applies after that too — if the page doesn’t match the intent, users just leave.
Out of curiosity: did you catch any differences in how people actually engaged once they landed?
"Every search became a chance to help someone first."
That line really hit home. It's such a simple mindset shift on paper, but actually feeling it especially after putting so much effort into a product that no one's seeing, is a whole different experience. There really is a click moment when you realize you've been optimizing for the wrong thing.
Quick question: how did you go about validating what people were actually searching for? Did you lean heavily on keyword tools, or was it more about observing behavior and working backward from the "why" behind weather searches?
Really appreciate you sharing this. It's one thing to be told "solve problems, not product searches," but another to see someone walk through exactly how that played out in the real world.