What are the "secret SEO hacks" that can make my tool visible?
I'm in the marketing phase, where I'm trying to scale my first tool without the help of paid advertising.
I'm trying to talk about it on my own social networks (while I have the link pinned to my profile)
I'm helping people in the comments answer questions about the problem
I'm going to create content for social networks around the problem
I want to appear in as many articles as possible (third-party websites, newsletters, my own blog, etc.)
Launch in directories
Well, one thing I've always wanted to earn credit for would be to be mentioned in Wikipedia.I managed to do it a few times for minimalist phone, but only in 2 languages; as soon as I published in English, they reported us and deleted the remaining articles in those two languages.
What are your guaranteed tips to increase my chances of getting a link on Wikipedia? + other "secret SEO hacks"?
Replies
Softorino 💻📲
@busmark_w_nika On Wikipedia, the thing that worked better for me than chasing a page: getting cited inside an article that already exists. Editors kill promotional pages fast, but a citation that backs up a factual claim tends to survive, because it's doing a job for the article instead of asking for space. So publish something actually citable, original data or a proper comparison, then go find the paragraph that's missing a source.
The other one is boring but it pays: YouTube. A 90 second screen recording titled with the exact phrase somebody types can sit on page 1 of Google for months, and it gets there way before a blog post on a new domain will. Same logic as what Omri said about threads getting indexed, except you get to pick the phrase up front.
And people don't search for categories, they search for their exact mess. Not "screentime app", more like "how do I stop opening instagram without deleting it". Do you know which ugly long phrases people already use to find minimalist phone? That list is usually where the easy wins are hiding.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@yelyzaveta_kibets Good advice with that YouTube video – I didn't know that it can work so well. I more talk about SafeLimit, because I want to position this one tool well :)
On the Wikipedia point - I'd actually treat that as a signal, not a setback. Wikipedia's notability bar is deliberately strict, and getting a page deleted for a new tool usually means it was written to promote the tool rather than to document something independently notable. There's no "hack" around that, and honestly you don't want one - a page that survives review only happens after independent press/reviews already exist, so it's a lagging indicator of visibility, not a source of it.
What actually moved the needle for tools I've watched grow: dofollow backlinks from real usage, not directory submissions. Directories mostly help crawlers find you faster, they rarely rank or send traffic on their own. The stuff that compounds is: writing pages that answer a specific technical question your tool solves (comparison pages, "how to do X without Y" posts), so people link to it naturally when discussing that problem, and answering the same question well enough in a PH launch thread or forum that people come back to it later - PH threads get indexed and keep getting found long after launch day.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@omri_ben_shoham1 It is true, to be honest, most of the traffic for SafeLimit (my LinkedIn extension) are from this thread :D
Founder here, I run usebravery.com, so my whole business depends on this working and for a long time it did not.
One thing on Wikipedia that neither answer mentioned and that changes what you are chasing: Wikipedia marks its external links nofollow. A link there passes no ranking signal at all. What it gives you is referral traffic and the citation itself. Still worth wanting, but not for the reason it usually gets wanted, and Omri's framing of it as a lagging indicator is the right one.
The bigger thing I would check before any of this list pays off. Everything in this thread, and everything on your list, is demand side work. All of it assumes Google is fetching your pages. Ours was not.
We ran a blog for 16 months doing roughly what you describe. 294 indexable pages, 236 of which never received a single impression. 230 URLs sat in Search Console as Discovered, currently not indexed, which is Google saying it knows the address exists and has not fetched it. Not ranked badly. Not fetched. Every hour spent on phrasing in that period went into a page Google had not read.
Part of the cause was ours. Any path containing a dot fell out of our route matcher into a locale handler and returned a 500, so Googlebot was let in and then handed an error. In Search Console that reads identically to being blocked, which is why it survived so long.
On Lisa's question about finding the ugly phrases, the first place I would look is not a keyword tool. It is the Search Console query report filtered to roughly positions 8 through 30. Those are phrases you already surface for and lose. Real wording from real people, pre-qualified as things Google already considers your page relevant to, and the list is usually short enough to work through in an afternoon.
One measurement from our side that cuts against the obvious move: our informational posts averaged 84 impressions each, our commercial ones 6.4, and the 12 most commercial pages combined got 15 impressions and 0 clicks. Same site, same plumbing, same author. So I would not assume the buying-intent phrases are where the easy wins are.
What does your Discovered, currently not indexed count look like? That is the number I would want to see before spending another week on directories.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@serdarships What do you mean by "real wording from real people"? How can I find it out?
E.g. when people want to get their LinkedIn account back, they will not be searching for "LinkedIn restricted", but they will search for "how to get my LinkedIn account back"?
@busmark_w_nika Your LinkedIn example is exactly it, and you got the mechanism right in the question itself.
The way I find it is boring: I stop guessing and read the Search Console query report, including the queries that got zero clicks. Those are the useful ones, because they are people who saw us and did not think we were the answer.
Here is a live one from a fragrance site I run. We published a glossary entry titled "Eau de Toilette". Here is what people actually typed to reach it: "eau de toilette perfume", "is eau de toilette perfume", "what is eau de toilette spray", "is eau de toilette for men", "edt fragrance", "define edt perfume", "perfume toilette".
Three things fall out of that list, and none of them were guessable from the desk.
They attach a word we never used. Almost every query carries "perfume" next to it. We had written the page as if the reader already knew eau de toilette was a kind of perfume. They do not. The real question behind the query is not "what is eau de toilette", it is "is this the same thing as perfume, or a different product". Same words, different question, and we were answering the wrong one.
2. They type the abbreviation, we typed the full name. "edt fragrance", "define edt perfume". We had the phrase "EDT" nowhere on the page.
3. The grammar is a question, not a noun. "is eau de toilette for men" is someone standing in a shop, not someone doing research. That query wants a first sentence that answers yes or no, not a definition paragraph.
So the method, in order: Search Console, Queries tab, sort by impressions, then read the zero-click rows, with the date range set wide because low-volume sites need every row. For each query, write down the question behind it, not the keyword: "linkedin restricted" and "how to get my linkedin account back" are the same topic and two completely different emotional states. Then go where the wording is unfiltered, the exact subreddit or forum where your users complain, and read how they phrase the problem before anyone has taught them the vocabulary. Search Console shows you the words that already reach you. Forums show you the words from people who have not found you yet. Finally, rewrite the page so the first sentence answers the question in their words. Not the whole page, just the opening.
The trap on my side was assuming our vocabulary and theirs overlapped. It did not. We were ranking around position 50 for the exact term we had optimised for, and every query with real intent in it was a phrasing we had never written down anywhere.
Disclosure, since it shapes the example: I build and run affiliate sites for other people, so measuring this badly is my own problem before it is anyone else's.
Softorino 💻📲
@busmark_w_nika Smart to push one tool, the YouTube thing works way better when you can own like 3 exact phrases instead of spreading thin. What's the ugliest search phrase SafeLimit fixes? That's the video I'd make first.