STEP BY STEP – Do this to make Google’s algorithm
If you want Google’s algorithm to
love your site, then create free tools.
You don’t need coding knowledge and you
don’t need a lot of money to make it work.
Unlike blog posts, free tools inherently contain
value at scale and ultimately give Google
exactly what they want: useful resources for
searchers that organically attract backlinks.
But here’s the thing: no matter how useful
your tools are, they won’t reach their full
traffic potential unless you carefully
follow a proven 3-part strategy.
And this strategy is responsible for possibly two
of the greatest organic traffic growth stories ever.
And it all begins at part 1,
choosing the right tools to create.
Now, it’s important that you choose tool ideas that
are a) in demand, and b) relevant to your business.
And don’t compromise on either list item
otherwise part 2 and 3 will be a waste of time.
Take our keyword generation tool as an example.
The main query definitely has tons of search
demand with roughly 29,000 monthly searches.
And because it’s basically a free version
of our paid tool, Keywords Explorer,
it’s very relevant to our business.
So to find a list of tool ideas for your site,
start by brainstorming some broad keywords
related to your niche.
So if you have a personal finance site,
you’d jot down things like credit card,
retirement, 401k, social security, bank
account, and mortgage to name a few.
Now take that list and paste it into a keyword
research tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
And then head on over to the Matching terms report.
And to narrow in on just tool keywords, hit
the “Include” box, then the “Any word” tab,
and type in these exact words: “calculator,”
“generator,” “tool,” “checker,” “tracker,” and “estimator.”
Apply the filter, and just like that, I’ve got over
67,000 tool keywords with over 6 million total
searches in just the us.
Now, because a lot of these keywords will
have very similar meanings, we need to extract
just the main tool ideas.
So at worst, you can manually sift through
the keywords to find the unique tool ideas,
or at best, you can cluster them instantly by
using the “Cluster by parent topic” feature
in Keywords explorer.
So now those 67,000 keywords have been
brought down to 1,500 or so clusters –
or basically tool ideas.
Now, you might want to start creating tools
right now, but that would be a huge mistake
because you’d be skipping one of the
most important parts of this strategy.
And that’s planning your tool hub.
And in my opinion, the structure is the x factor
to getting these quick vertical traffic graphs.
I’ll explain that in more detail soon because first,
it’s vital that you understand two fundamental steps
to creating an effective tool hub.
So step one is to group your tool ideas together.
To do that, export your list of clusters,
clean them up as needed in Sheets,
and then head on over to ChatGPT and say:
“Using only this list of keywords, organize
them into a hierarchy with “main categories”
(like “Retirement”), sub categories,
and sub-sub categories if needed.
And I like to see the output in Yaml.
And step two is to finalize and visualize your structure.
And this is important to do because it’s going
to make sure that your tools are organized in
a logical structure, maximizing the impacts
from part 3 which we’ll get to soon.
But we need to finish things up in part
2 first – creating these free tools.
Thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT, you can
create just about any simple tools you want
without coding knowledge or money.
All you need is the idea and a bit of patience.
So we already have the ideas in our tree chart,
so let’s build out the Roth IRA calculator.
To start, I’ll Google for my target keyword
and I’ll hit up BankRate’s calculator.
Now, I’m going to make a note of the form
fields, the default settings, and the result,
which I’ll use for testing in a bit.
So I’m going to open up ChatGPT and say:
“Create a Roth IRA calculator that calculates
compound interest of a time period.
Use JS and HTML.
These are the fields and some default values.
Show me the estimated IRA balance
when the retirement age is met.”
And within seconds, our first tool is ready
to test and we want it to return the expected
result that we got from Bankrate.
To test your tool, go to Jsfiddle.net, paste in
the HTML portion here and the JS portion
here if needed. Then hit Run.
And finally, I’ll hit the Calculate button
which should return back the same result
from our test site.
And a big time fail!
Which is why you need to sprinkle in that bit of
patience and help ChatGPT solve the problem.
And after about 10 minutes of doing some math
together, we ended up with some successful code.
Now, you could technically go with this
duplicate tool and put it on your site.
But it’s going to make your job very tough
in part 3 so the best thing you can do at
this point is to find a way to improve on this tool.
And a great place to find inspiration is Reddit.
So I’ll search for something like “is
there a roth ira calculator with”,
and I’ll narrow the search down to just Reddit.
And this one looks super interesting.
The person said: “I’m trying to figure
out how much money I should put in
per month to eventually reach 1 mil.”
That’s brilliant! A reverse roth IRA calculator.
I’m definitely adding that to our tool.
Now, after your code is ready you’ve
got to put it up on your site.