1 Tool Site Or Many Tool Sites?

[freshpeppermint]

So from this forum I recently found this website called https://tinywow.com and I was comparing it to a website called https://imagecompressor.com

The tinywow has 5mil and the imagecompressor has like 1.1mil according to similarweb. But my question is wouldn't it always be smartest to do a website similar to tinywow rather than imagecompressor despite it ranking WAAAY higher on serp for specific keywords? So that you overtime build WAY more backlinks than Imagecompressor and outrank them based on sheer authority??

Also how come according to similarweb this website https://www.iloveimg.com/ gets way more traffic than tinywow despite having less tools? Maybe tinywow is newer and overtime should eventually outrank iloveimg right or no?

I only ask this because I plan on creating tool-type of websites and I was wondering what tinywow did is smarter to do than just having 1 tool websites? I am also adding tools to current blogs in the hopes of outranking my competition's articles in the long run.

 

[secretagentdad]

Call me the local nut case.
Portfolios are for losers hedging their wealth away.

All in on the best shit u got.

 

[zak]

Do they make sense under 1 umbrella?
If so, combine them onto 1 site.

VPN + Firewall -> 1 site.
Image compressor + VPN -> 2 sites.

Some ways of parsing that:
Do the tools have the same audience?
Are the core technologies of the tools related?
Would a company w/ tool X in their portfolio have a competitive advantage in the market for tool Y?

 

[freshpeppermint]

Call me the local nut case.
Portfolios are for losers hedging their wealth away.

All in on the best shit u got.

Wait so portfolio being bad as in having multiple tool sites or having multiple tools on 1 site?? I am confused as to what you recommend/said.

 

[secretagentdad]

Do one site. One brand. Play your best card and bet on it. It’s fine to have a bundle of tools. Just don’t be me 2 ware. Lots of good saas bundles go to shit cuz they get so carried away with product line expansion and customer ltv optimization that they kill the value aspect of their deal.

 

[freshpeppermint]

Do one site. One brand. Play your best card and bet on it. It’s fine to have a bundle of tools. Just don’t be me 2 ware. Lots of good saas bundles go to shit cuz they get so carried away with product line expansion and customer ltv optimization that they kill the value aspect of their deal.

Oh I wasn't thinking saas at all. My reason for adding tools is ONLY so that I somehow get backlinks built to it and then my articles make me money and maybe I might add display ads. That's why I mentioned bundle of tools since I would technically build more links with more tools as I am probably not gonna be able to build 1 bigger tool.

You think in this scenario alone it's not worth doing tools as my goal is just to push my articles forward more rather than make anything with the tools themselves?

 

[secretagentdad]

Why would you do tools and then just settle for media rpms.
Tools let you condition a habit and build a fancy up-sell funnel after getting your users invested in a process.

Backlinks are peasant shit compared to creating reasons to return.
You can and will get tons of backlinks as a side effect of creating compelling reasons to return to your site anyway. Those are worth jack shit compared to regulars that use your tool every month, or evangelists who share you on the regular.
Useful tools are like content you don’t have to write except way better. Nobody will come back to read the same old article month after month. A decent niche tool can build regulars that leave it open in a browser tab. A content generating tool can be even more valuable, especially if it makes an output that shares well on social platforms. Check out all the people killing it with stupid automatic art generators atm.

 

[freshpeppermint]

Why would you do tools and then just settle for media rpms.
Tools let you condition a habit and build a fancy up-sell funnel after getting your users invested in a process.

Backlinks are peasant shit compared to creating reasons to return.
You can and will get tons of backlinks as a side effect of creating compelling reasons to return to your site anyway. Those are worth jack shit compared to regulars that use your tool every month, or evangelists who share you on the regular.
Useful tools are like content you don’t have to write except way better. Nobody will come back to read the same old article month after month. A decent niche tool can build regulars that leave it open in a browser tab. A content generating tool can be even more valuable, especially if it makes an output that shares well on social platforms. Check out all the people killing it with stupid automatic art generators atm.

Wait so, you mean to say to create maybe an email funnel and sell stuff on it or find a way that the free tool shares stuff on social media so people keep sharing it or trying to say to make money from the TOOL itself like how you do it?

But how would this work with some simple tool like an image compressor for example? Tools like automatic art generator and your keyword tool all have complex options where users can purchase something from the tool itself or like have free and paid versions.

 

[zak]

But how would this work with some simple tool like an image compressor for example?

https://tinypng.com/
The blueprint is already there.

You can:
* Put limits on the free version so people pay to upgrade
* Have paid integrations or plugins for Wordpress, Photoshop, and any number of other tools that use images.
* Introduce other paid tools that take advantage of image compression (CDN, etc.)

 

[secretagentdad]

Give away free stuff to get traffic.
Sell stuff to make money.

It’s really not more complicated than that.
The best things to sell usually have unit cost or include your own time.

My advice is focus on the free until you find a winning combination of brand identity and free stuff that can grow in a self sustaining way.

When you have base line returning traffic; stuff just has a way of working out. Squeezing money out of traffic it is a much easier problem than getting getting traffic.

 

[freshpeppermint]

I was wondering about so this. I'd like to know what you think about this @Ryuzaki

For the keyword: image compressor

On google I see the first page as imagecompressor.com however, how come it's beating websites that clearly have more authority?

It's beating this website called: iloveimg.com & small seo tools website. If you put both of them in SEMRush they have a higher authority and more backlinks. SMALL SEO TOOLS have literally way more content (like text) under explaining the image compressor yet somehow this website is at the top.

I thought exact-match domains would get penalized or knocked down by google? Also, this website is only offering JPG, GIF, and PNG while the other sites are offering JPEG, PNG, SVG, HEIC, WEBP and GIF.

But let's say it's exact match domain or whatever, fine but why is smallseotools.com getting beat by iloveimg.com? small seo tools is a much bigger site according to similarweb. How are these sites even beating small seo tools? I don't get it. Is it the meta description or title?

Also one more thing about the exact match domain. How come in this case neilpatel was able to outrank this guy despite the exact match domain for the keyword SEO Analyzer. (This whole website is bought from a marketplace and he's ranking it on google. It's a YouTuber who shows how he has done this with other premade PHP scripts like this.)

 

[Ryuzaki]

Algorithms are complex calculations with a lot of variables. Some of the more obvious ones I'd think are at play here are:

• EMD's can help with Click Through Ratings in the SERPs which leads to higher rankings
• Homepages will more easily rank over inner pages because they naturally collect more and stronger backlinks and internal links
• Google likes to rank niche-specific sites over niche-specific articles on broader sites. It doesn't always pan out if the broader site is incredibly strong. The difference here is "these are sites about image compression and nothing else" versus "this is a site about a ton of tools that also happens to include image compression".
• Google doesn't understand which file types the sites offer, and the users probably don't click on enough options to sort it out with user metrics
• Having more text under a tool doesn't mean anything these days. Having the tool is what serves the user intent, not text
• Neil Patel has a killer backlink profile and is one of the biggest SEO brands out there, period. All the guys you think are big, Neil Patel is bigger. Branding & backlink profiles are stronger than a measly EMD on a .me extension.

There's more I'm sure but I don't want to spend a bunch of time on this. There's a bunch of ranking factors and therefore no simple answers.

I'm glad you're in the trenches dissecting SERPs. The only conclusions to form are correlations. We can shove inputs into the black box algorithm and see what comes out and try to understand causations, but it's still just correlations because we don't know what the algorithm is doing, but we do know there's a good bit of randomization built in and constant testing going on too. And we most certainly won't get any definite answer, like some weighting of 100+ variables.

Sometimes you gotta do what all these guys did. Pick your means of approach and attack, shoot your shot, build links and do promotion, and then either move on because SEO was your only goal and you maxed it out, or move to other platforms to promote because you believe in the business and have bigger plans.

 

[freshpeppermint]

Algorithms are complex calculations with a lot of variables. Some of the more obvious ones I'd think are at play here are:

• EMD's can help with Click Through Ratings in the SERPs which leads to higher rankings
• Homepages will more easily rank over inner pages because they naturally collect more and stronger backlinks and internal links
• Google likes to rank niche-specific sites over niche-specific articles on broader sites. It doesn't always pan out if the broader site is incredibly strong. The difference here is "these are sites about image compression and nothing else" versus "this is a site about a ton of tools that also happens to include image compression".
• Google doesn't understand which file types the sites offer, and the users probably don't click on enough options to sort it out with user metrics
• Having more text under a tool doesn't mean anything these days. Having the tool is what serves the user intent, not text
• Neil Patel has a killer backlink profile and is one of the biggest SEO brands out there, period. All the guys you think are big, Neil Patel is bigger. Branding & backlink profiles are stronger than a measly EMD on a .me extension.

There's more I'm sure but I don't want to spend a bunch of time on this. There's a bunch of ranking factors and therefore no simple answers.

I'm glad you're in the trenches dissecting SERPs. The only conclusions to form are correlations. We can shove inputs into the black box algorithm and see what comes out and try to understand causations, but it's still just correlations because we don't know what the algorithm is doing, but we do know there's a good bit of randomization built in and constant testing going on too. And we most certainly won't get any definite answer, like some weighting of 100+ variables.

Sometimes you gotta do what all these guys did. Pick your means of approach and attack, shoot your shot, build links and do promotion, and then either move on because SEO was your only goal and you maxed it out, or move to other platforms to promote because you believe in the business and have bigger plans.

So how would I beat an EMD which is ONLY a single tool site? I have a site that has a niche site in a certain topic that this tool fits under and would be useful to my "audience". The only option is to blast it with backlinks yeah? Or just write more articles and interlink all of them to this?

I bought a whole bunch of tools since I believe they would build more backlinks than just articles. And that I could rank them by having longer text at the bottom answering FAQs and stuff. (And yes the tools are useful to the niche that my site is about, but the issue is if it won't rank it's useless right?)

A few months ago I believe, I changed up a couple of articles on my old site and it seems to be making me some okayish income. But just like last time I was making a certain amount and I got hit and screwed. I relied on 1 affiliate program and that slowly vanished now. I am making pennies on Ezoic while the affiliate sales I am making are way more.

And I already bought articles that if they rank I think will, with a high chance, will make me money. (This time I ain't just giving a keyword and expecting the writer to pull some stuff up, I am giving guidelines and such and after that heavily editing it and uploading images, and videos and making sure my thing is the best. No AI bs.)

Should I keep getting more and more tools or just after a certain amount of tools (I already paid for and they making it, some of them will also make money directly), just go with articles? Cus in my head I always think more tools = more money vs articles cus fewer people are doing tools = less competition and you stand out more. Not only that I have been seeing how a guy I know ranked his minecraft voing website to 1mil+ traffic in 1 year. And it's literally just a tool, no articles but then you have people saying you have to target low comp low volume keywords and build a moat. And even if you target a low comp HIGH volume keyword you won't rank according to Avalanche technique right? since you are not in that tier.)

 

[cryptoy]

Give away free stuff to get traffic.
Sell stuff to make money.

It’s really not more complicated than that.
The best things to sell usually have unit cost or include your own time.

My advice is focus on the free until you find a winning combination of brand identity and free stuff that can grow in a self sustaining way.

When you have base line returning traffic; stuff just has a way of working out. Squeezing money out of traffic it is a much easier problem than getting getting traffic.

Nicely said and agree. That given, lets say you start on a new site, how long would you want to try to work on traffic first And what is considered enough before you start to monetize it?