Building free tools is a not a viable long-term SEO strategy

8 points by lucgagan 2 years ago | 8 comments

When I started https://ray.run/tools/, I started with a simple premise: I will build free tools relevant to my target audience, without ads or anything else that would negatively weigh on user experience, with one goal – building long-term SEO ranking.

I thought that if I build a collection of the most polished tools that are pleasant to use, over time Google will start recommending them to more and more people. My goal was to invest upfront into developing domain reputation, so that when I launch my SaaS in the future, I am not starting from 0.

At first, it looked like this strategy is working. The first month I got roughly 1k unique visitors. Then it quickly grew to 4k uniques, and maxed out at 5k uniques after 5 months. But then (2023 November) some Google update launched and it was a downhill ride since. It wasn't all at once, but it slowly dwindled to about 800 uniques per month and seems to be stable at around that number. What's worse is that most users are direct users, i.e. coming from bookmarks. Increasingly, Google started to deprioritize results even for things that Rayrun was ranking #1.

I don't know what this means for long-term SEO strategy, but it was pretty devastating learning for me. I am not focused on building the product and don't invest much back into SEO play, but wanted to share this as a cautionary learning with others.

rchaud 2 years ago |

I worked in SEO for a long time. Google (and really Bing and everybody else) do not care anymore about organic SEO. Look at the average SERP. You could rank #1 for organic search results and your link would still be near the bottom of the page buried beneath sponsored results, thumbnails of Youtube video results, and "people also asked" blocks of links.

Remember when SEO 101 involved having a site that's primarily easy for search bots to crawl? Today, that doesn't cause your site to rank better, but it does make it easy for Google to scrape your site's content to show as an "Instant Answer".

It's pay to play if you want your site to rank on search these days.

kevindamm 2 years ago |

Did you make incremental changes to these pages over time, too? It seems that unchanging content is an anti-signal these days, and might account for what you're seeing. There are also hundreds of changes to the ranking algo every year so it could be something else.

rogansage 2 years ago |

Building free tools alone is not a viable LT strategy, you need to market any tool (even the free ones) to get traction and usage. If you rely on SEO, you need to clearly demonstrate to Google that this is the best page for a search query (or set of) -- this is't very obvious to google if the value is not textual so this needs to be worked on to complement it (then you need backlinks too... the marathon begins).

I would question whether the 'ad-free' element of the strategy is potentially only a very small and ultimately insignificant weight in the perceived value of your tool vs others and might not be as impactful as you'd think -- if you deliver enough value for people not to care about having to ignore ads (which ppl are very, very good at these days) then they will confidently ignore the ads and find the value (e.g. academic referencing tools, wetransfer, {filetype}-to-{filetype} convertors)

paulcole 2 years ago |

> if I build a collection of the most polished tools that are pleasant to use, over time Google will start recommending them to more and more people

Why did you believe this?

bruce511 2 years ago | |

It's a variation on "if you build it, they will come." This is a massive myth which is basically taught at school level (hard work leads to rewards).

It is -really- hard to fight this myth because it "seems right" and because it is pervasive amongst the educator sector.

Unfortunately, as a reply to the original question, I'd say "you cannot build a business based on the goodwill of another unrelated party. Consider this a cheap life lesson, and modify your strategy appropriately."

greyzor7 2 years ago |

What is your approximate DA (domain authority) score? What kind of content do your free tools provide? If it's AI-related, it just got heavily penalized by Google's latest announcements about depriorizing low-quality results. I'm adopting a similar strategy for https://microlaunch.net, long-term SEO + free toos.

altdataseller 2 years ago |

Free tools work only when it doesn’t rely on SEO. It works better when it’s something people would recommend to their friends. Then it also becomes the go-to tool people link to…

Then eventually you start to convert those free tool leads to actual customers of your paid tool

auct 2 years ago |

I had simple online tool with nice simple design getting 5-7k visitors a day. It was ranked top3-top5 in most regions. But few months ago google just shadowbanned it and now showing alternatives with bazillion ads.

Imo google at least send email why.