How Our SEO Business Navigated Major Google Search Challenges [Update]

Robert Brandl

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Published: June 9th, 2024

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Robert Brandl

Founder, Tooltester S.L.

$110K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Tooltester S.L.

tooltester.com

from Barcelona, Spain

started October 2009

$110,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Robert recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Tooltester S.L.? Check out these stories:

1. How We Built A $1.4M/Year Website With SEO (2023) ➜

This is a follow up story for Tooltester S.L.. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 1 year ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hi, I am Robert Brandl, the founder of Tooltester S.L (find my original story here). With our team of ten, we help freelancers and small businesses find the best web tools for their success. To do that, we create reviews and tutorials of the best website builders, hosting companies, and live chat tools—or at least we used to. As you will learn in this update, our focus has shifted strongly to email marketing.

We even made it into the Financial Times ranking of the fastest-growing European companies (FT1000) two years in a row (2021 and 2022).

Alongside Tooltester, we also run EmailToolTester, which we planned to integrate into the main site to create a ‘super review’ website. However, this didn’t turn out as planned.

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Tooltester.com traffic chart

Although this chart looks pretty dire, there is a silver lining to this story. Read on to find out why.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Starting in November 2022, Google launched several updates aimed at review and affiliate websites, which reduced Tooltester.com's traffic by more than 70% by March 2023. The same was true for most of our competitors.

This seemed extremely unfair, as most of the traffic was taken over by massive sites like Forbes, CNET, and PC Mag, whose reviews often lacked depth. In many cases, I had my doubts about whether these sites had even used the products that they were "reviewing".

It was quite frustrating because half a year before, we had started to invest massively in new content. Our goal was to achieve what SEOs call topical authority in the 'website builders' space by writing about all angles of that specific topic. But it didn’t move the needle; it seemed like strong forces were working against us.

Faced with this challenge, I decided to call off the merger with EmailTooltester as it seemed too risky. EmailTooltester was much more stable than its (once) bigger brother. Google updates didn’t have a large impact on it, as you can see in this graph:

EmailTooltester traffic chart

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

The biggest challenge, without a doubt, was the loss of organic search traffic. After the significant drop in November 2022 and the accompanying revenue losses of around 30%, it was in March 2023 that I announced in an internal meeting that we would throw all of our weight behind EmailTooltester (I remember that day well, as it was my birthday).

We pivoted the entire company to focus on email marketing. The great news was that almost everyone on our team had worked in email marketing in some form or capacity in the past. So, it wasn’t too difficult to make that move. However, it wasn’t what most people originally signed up for, so I was really proud of how flexible and positive everyone was about this adjustment.

Photo from a recent team event at a cooking class

Along with this change came a change in our management structure. Until a year ago, everyone reported directly to me, which became too burdensome and left me with too little time for all my team members (and frankly, also led to a bit of dissatisfaction, as I learned). To improve this situation, I decided to appoint my first manager, who now has three direct reports, freeing up a lot of time for me.

This reminded me that the Chinese word for crisis is a combination of ‘danger’ but also ‘opportunity’. And the opportunity was precisely where I put my focus.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

It became obvious that my business was far too dependent on free Google traffic. Seth Godin’s book “This is Marketing” came to mind, where he says something along the lines of, "if your business relies on free search traffic, you don’t have a business."

When I first read this book, I thought the old man just didn’t get SEO. A few years later, I have to admit that he was right all along. His recommendation was to build a brand, so people primarily search for your company name.

And this is exactly our goal now: I want to become a real marketer and not just be an SEO. EmailTooltester has to become a brand that people actively search for. Otherwise, we won’t stand a chance in this new environment.

Take inventory of any potential limiting beliefs that might hold you back if you want to grow your business.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Looking at EmailTooltester’s growth in both traffic and revenue by around 10% tells me the pivot was the right decision. Unsurprisingly, Tooltester has continued to shrink. However, I have one employee now who is committed to turning it around, and he has already made a restructuring plan, which mainly involves updating content and pruning old pages. To be continued.

My big plan for EmailTooltester is to tap into a range of different traffic sources. We have invested heavily in our own email marketing and thanks to the use of lead magnets and banners in our main articles, we managed to grow our monthly leads by 250% (one example being this email marketing beginners ebook).

I am also working on building a personal brand on social media via my Twitter (X) and LinkedIn profiles, where I mainly talk about our SEO and email marketing experiments.

It takes a lot of effort but I am now starting to see the first wins in terms of follower growth and post impressions (one of my recent Tweets had more than 80k impressions and another one got me a DM from a B-list tech founder celebrity).

Aside from that, I am extremely glad that we have always put a lot of effort into our YouTube channel, which already has close to 30k subscribers. It’s a strategic priority to grow it alongside our TikTok channel (which is proving harder than expected).

Looking at the upcoming challenges regarding artificial intelligence, we also started adding services like Consulting and an Email Authentication Service. Through these conversations, we are trying to understand our target audience better and offer them more relevant content as well as productized services.

Our goal is clear: we want to be the one-stop shop for all things small business email marketing.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

I’ve started to dig into personality types to understand myself and the people around me better (both in my personal and work life). The framework I’ve been using is the Enneagram, which lists 9 main types of people.

For anyone interested, I recommend AbbeyHowe’s YouTube channel, which does a fantastic job explaining the concept in a very entertaining way.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

I think it’s a great idea to look at any limiting beliefs you might have. Just to show you an example:

Before I started my business, I read the “4-Hour Work Week”, which is a fantastic guide to starting a location-independent business and automating every possible process in it. While these ideas served me well initially, they also held me back from trying out things that might limit my freedom or don’t scale easily (e.g. hiring employees sooner, offering services or consulting).

In short: take inventory of any potential limiting beliefs that might hold you back if you want to grow your business.