I bought csvtools.com at auction for $380. Now what?
I've taken the indiehacker obsession with domain names to new heights.
Instead of spending $10-20 on a domain name for every half-baked idea I have like a normal indiehacker, I spend hours monitoring domain auctions and sometimes pay significant sums of money for individual domains that catch my interest.
Late last year, I saw that csvtools.com was up for auction. I started my career in data analysis and have spent a LOT of time working with CSVs. I spent a few minutes digging through Ahrefs keyword volume data and decided this one was worth a bid.
Whelp, turns out I won the auction for $380. Now what?
Planning the build
I decided to start by building free tools targeting long-tail search traffic. If I could get traffic, I would figure out how to monetize it later.
There are a million variations of "convert csv to ____" searches (ok maybe not a million but hundreds at least). The highest volume ones are developer-focused (like "convert csv to json") and are already well-served with ad-supported tools or websites that serve as "side project marketing" for SaaS companies.
I wanted to compete by being comprehensive, no cost, ad free, and not require uploading potentially sensitive data to a random website. I brainstormed a list of about 100 possible CSV tools.
Building the site
With the help of my BFF Claude, I built a static site that performed all of the work on the client-side and could be hosted on Cloudflare Pages for free. My only ongoing cost is the domain registration (~$10/year using Cloudflare's domain registrar).
Over the last month, I've added almost all of the tools from my original brainstorm to the site.
I'm not an SEO pro, but I tried to do all of the obvious on-page stuff (one page per tool, proper meta tags, <h1> tags including the search term, some description/faq content on each tool page, etc).
Getting traffic
I submitted my sitemap to Google Search Console on March 14th. To my surprise, I started ranking for "csv tools" and related searches within days.
Google is only indexing 16 pages with 89 pages "Discovered - currently not indexed". My next challenge is to get more of the site indexed and see what that does to impressions and clicks.
What should I try next to get this site to rank?
Buying a premium domain like that is a solid move, but the "Discovered - currently not indexed" status is usually Google's way of saying it’s not sure if your 100+ pages are unique enough to bother crawling yet.
The issue with programmatic SEO for tools is that if the page is just a header and a text box, Google might flag it as "thin content" because it looks too similar to the other 99 tools on your site. To fix the indexing lag, you might need to add specific use-case examples or a "how-to" section for each converter to give the crawler some unique text to chew on for every single URL.
Since you're already ranking for the main term, have you tried linking the "non-indexed" pages directly from your high-performing "CSV tools" homepage to force the crawler to follow the path?
The homepage is basically just a list of links to all of the individual tools. I've put "how to use" and FAQ sections on each tool page to give them a bit of unique content, but all of the tool pages are quite similar.
I'm up to 22 indexed pages after doing exactly zero work on the site in the last few weeks.