People often ask me how a small, one-person site like ToolMany gets found on Google next to companies with big marketing teams. There is no trick. There is a process, and I repeat it for every single article I publish. This post is that process, written the way I would explain it to a friend.
Step 1: Start from a job, not a keyword
Every guide on the ToolMany blog starts with a real task someone has right now: “my PDF is too big to email”, “the job portal rejected my résumé”, “I need a passport photo by tomorrow”. Only after that do I open a keyword tool to see how people phrase it.
I look for three things:
- Intent — will the searcher be happy if they land on a page that lets them do the job? For a tool site that is “how to” and “free … online” searches.
- Phrasing — the exact words people use, including the long versions (“compress PDF to 200 KB for a visa form”).
- What already ranks — I read the top results and ask honestly: can I make something more useful, shorter or clearer?
Step 2: One article, one search intent
The biggest mistake I see on new blogs is one post trying to rank for ten different things. I write one article per intent and give it a clean, descriptive URL — the same rule this site follows, for example /blog/ionic-capacitor-one-codebase-web-and-mobile. Short, readable, no dates or random IDs.
Step 3: Write it like a human who has done the task
Search engines have become very good at spotting thin, rewritten content, and readers spot it even faster. My rules for every article:
- Answer the question in the first two or three sentences. No long story before the answer.
- Show the steps with real screenshots of the real tool — never stock photos.
- Add the details only experience gives you: the file size a portal accepts, the setting that breaks formatting, the mistake I made the first time.
- Use headings that read like questions people ask, so the page is easy to skim.
- Finish with a clear next step — usually a link to the tool that does the job.
Step 4: Internal linking is the multiplier
Internal links tell Google which pages matter and help readers find the next useful thing. On ToolMany every guide links to its tool, every tool links back to its guide, and related guides link to each other — the PDF merger guide points to the compressor guide, because people who merge files often need to shrink them next.
A few rules I follow:
- Use descriptive anchor text (“build an ATS-friendly résumé”), never “click here”.
- Link where it genuinely helps the reader, usually two to five times in a post.
- Make sure no article is an orphan — every post is linked from a hub page and from at least one other post.
- Group content into clusters: PDF guides, image guides, career guides, each with its own hub.
Step 5: Technical SEO you should never skip
Great content still struggles on a slow, messy site. This is my checklist, and it is the same one I applied to this portfolio:
- Fast first paint — pre-rendered HTML, compressed images (WebP), lazy loading below the fold. Core Web Vitals in the green.
- One clear title and meta description per page, written for humans.
- Structured data — BlogPosting for articles, FAQPage where there are real FAQs.
- A complete sitemap.xml and a clean robots.txt, submitted in Google Search Console.
- Canonical URLs so duplicate paths never compete with each other.
- Descriptive alt text on every image.
Mistakes I made (so you don’t have to)
- Publishing too many short posts. Ten 300-word articles did far less than three complete guides that really solved the problem.
- Writing for a keyword instead of a person. Repeating the same phrase makes a page worse to read and does not help it rank.
- Forgetting old posts. A guide that was right last year can be wrong today — tools change, interfaces change, prices change.
- Heavy images. One uncompressed screenshot can undo all your speed work. I export every image as WebP and serve a 2× version only to screens that need it.
The free tools I actually use
You do not need an expensive SEO suite to start. My everyday kit is simple: Google Search Console for real queries and indexing, Google’s own autocomplete and “People also ask” boxes for phrasing ideas, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse for performance, and a plain spreadsheet that maps every article to its keyword, its tool and the pages it links to. That spreadsheet is the secret weapon — it makes internal linking a system instead of an afterthought.
Step 6: Measure, then update
Publishing is the middle of the process, not the end. Every few weeks I open Search Console, find pages with many impressions but few clicks, and improve their titles. I look for queries a page almost ranks for and add a section that answers them. Updating a good article is often worth more than writing a new one.
Write for the person with the problem first. Rankings are the side effect of being the most useful page for them.
— Ali Hamza
Want this for your site?
I use exactly the same approach on e-commerce stores — I share that version in how I grow Shopify and WooCommerce stores with SEO. And if you want a fast site with SEO built in from day one, have a look at my work or send me a message.
Written by
MERN stack and hybrid mobile developer from Multan. 4+ years building dashboards, SaaS platforms, e-commerce and real-time apps for clients in Pakistan, the USA, the UK, Germany and Libya. Founder of ToolMany.com, where he also writes the SEO guides.
