Brute force SEO - An ongoing side project case study

Hey everyone,

My name is Sam Creamer and I'm here to share a bit about a strategy I've worked on in the last few years that is different than most things I see on product hunt and indie hackers.

I call it brute force SEO, but there may be a real term for what this is. The concept is to make websites that perform trivial calculations (such as: "What is the greatest common factor of 3 and 9?") and then rank for very specific keywords on a massive scale.

The first site I tried this on is a project I've been working on for almost two years, called TotalCalc (https://totalcalc.com). I was inspired to make TotalCalc by a few similar sites that I noticed were receiving millions of users per month. Surely if I could be a bit better, I could get a fraction of those users to come to my site and steal the ad revenue.

This turned out to be harder than I expected and it was taking a long time to rank for decent keywords such as "Compound Interest Calculator".

One day, I came across a site that I noticed had a url like "https://website.com/what-is-the-derivative-of-x2". I spied a bit on SEMRush and realized that these guys were getting millions on users per month through search engines by ranking for terms like "What is the derivative of x^2". Long tail keywords like this are easy to rank for because if you go niche enough, it's highly likely that there is literally no competition.

I started by changing a few of the calculators on TotalCalc to use parts of the url as parameters (for example: https://totalcalc.com/calculator/what-are-the-factors-of-81). I then wrote some python scripts to produce massive sitemaps with millions of pages, and submitted it to Google.

It worked right away. I went from having 60-70 search engine visitors a day to having 200+. This started in January 2018. I now get around 500 users per day on TotalCalc during weekdays (a bit less on weekends). Most of the traffic comes from terms like "What is 254 seconds in minutes?".

I have since experimented with this on a few other sites:

https://pandaconversion.com (unit conversion)

https://cryptocactus.com (crypto conversion)

https://whatarethefactors.com (factor calculator, with many languages)

So far, I would say that it has NOT been a huge success, because to make decent ad revenue through search only, you need to have 15k+ users per day. I am still a long way out from that.

The appeal of ad serving to me was that it was so easy to start, and that I could really be passive once websites were set up.

I know that search engine traffic can take years and years to come in, so I'm just going to be patient with these projects and see where they go.

I wanted to share this tactic with you guys in case anyone is interested. I've seen it, at this point, on many sites but I haven't seen it written about anywhere.

Going forward, I'm working on projects that do not rely on gimmicky search engine tricks to get traffic, and I'm hoping to ship a few products this year that I can charge money for.

Anyone else have experience earning money through ad serving and getting traffic through search?

Thanks for reading, cheers!