New ask Hacker News story: Building free tools is a not a viable long-term SEO strategy

Building free tools is a not a viable long-term SEO strategy
4 by lucgagan | 1 comments on Hacker News.
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.

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