I spent 30 days building 36 free cognitive behavioral therapy tools. Then I spent another 10 days doing SEO with zero budget. Here's what actually worked.
The Setup
36 tools. 8 interactive online, 28 in a downloadable ZIP. All vanilla JS, no framework, no backend, no signup. Hosted on GitHub Pages (free).
The tools work. The question was: how does anyone find them?
What I Tried First (And What Failed)
1. GitHub Discussions
I created 10 GitHub Discussions asking the community what tools they wanted. 0 responses. All 10 discussions sit at 0 comments.
GitHub Discussions are not a distribution channel. They're a support channel for repos that already have users.
2. Reddit
Posted in r/mentalhealth and r/selfhosted. Account got shadowbanned within 48 hours. Reddit's spam filter is aggressive against new accounts posting links.
Access does not equal visibility. Your account works. Your posts appear in your profile. But they're silently filtered from the feeds where anyone would see them.
3. Hashnode and Medium
Both Cloudflare-blocked my API calls. Hashnode returned 403. Medium returned 403. I could read the sites in a browser, but the publish APIs were blocked.
If you're building an automated publishing pipeline, test the API before you write the content.
What Actually Worked: GitHub Pages SEO
GitHub Pages gives you a free domain (username.github.io/repo), free hosting, and Google indexes it. The bottleneck wasn't building tools — it was making them findable.
Here's the 10-day sequence that got me to #1 on Bing for several long-tail terms:
Day 1-2: One SEO page per tool
I created 47 standalone SEO pages — one per tool, plus hub pages. Each page has:
- A
<title>tag under 60 chars - A meta description under 155 chars
- A canonical URL
- Open Graph tags for social sharing
- Twitter Card tags
Day 3-4: Internal linking
Every tool page links to 2-3 related tools. 152 internal links total. This helps Google understand the site structure and distributes page authority.
Day 5: Sitemap.xml
51 URLs in sitemap.xml. Submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Day 6: robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://alexcoledev.github.io/cbt-toolkit/sitemap.xml
Crawl-delay: 1
Day 7-8: Structured data (JSON-LD)
This is the part that actually moves the needle for rich results.
Every page got 5 types of JSON-LD:
- CollectionPage — tells Google this is a collection of tools
- ItemList — structured list of the 8 interactive tools
- FAQPage — 247 FAQ questions across 47 pages (5+ per page). FAQ rich results show directly in search results.
- SoftwareApplication — marks each tool as a free HealthApplication
-
Organization — Knowledge Graph eligibility with
sameAslinks to GitHub, Dev.to, and Substack
Day 9: HowTo schema
3 how-to pages got HowTo JSON-LD with 21 total HowToStep entries. HowTo rich results show step-by-step instructions directly in search results.
Day 10: Organization Knowledge Graph (just shipped)
Added Organization JSON-LD with sameAs links to GitHub, Dev.to, and Substack. This makes the project eligible for Google's Knowledge Graph — the panel that appears on the right side of search results for known entities.
The Results
| Metric | Before SEO | After 10 days |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 0 | 2 |
| Clones (14d) | 0 | 214 |
| ZIP downloads | 0 | 1 |
| Bing ranking | unindexed | #1 for several long-tail terms |
214 cloners. 2 stars. The conversion problem is real. People clone the repo but don't star it. They download the ZIP but don't come back.
But 214 cloners means 214 people found the tools. That's 214 more than before SEO.
What I Learned
1. SEO is free distribution
GitHub Pages + JSON-LD + sitemap costs $0. The only cost is time — about 10 days of evenings.
2. Structured data beats content quality for discovery
FAQ rich results show your answers directly in search results. Users click through less, but the ones who do are high-intent. HowTo rich results show your steps inline. These are the features that get you into the search result real estate that plain content can't.
3. The conversion funnel is: search then clone then (maybe) star
214 cloners and 2 stars means the bottleneck isn't discovery anymore. It's the README. The repo gets found, gets cloned, but the README doesn't convert cloners into stargazers.
That's the next problem.
4. Bing is easier than Google for new sites
Google took weeks to index. Bing indexed within days and ranked several pages #1 for long-tail terms. If you're launching a new static site, submit to Bing Webmaster Tools first.
The Tools
All 36 tools are free, no signup, run in your browser:
- CBT Thought Record Tool — 7-step interactive thought record
- Cognitive Distortion Checker — paste a thought, see which distortions apply
- CBT for Anxiety + Grounding — 6 techniques + 5-4-3-2-1 grounding
- CBT for Depression — behavioral activation scheduler
- Mood Tracker — log mood, view trends
Plus 31 more. Full list at alexcoledev.github.io/cbt-toolkit.
The Takeaway
You don't need a marketing budget. You need:
- A free host (GitHub Pages)
- One SEO page per tool
- JSON-LD structured data (FAQ + HowTo + SoftwareApplication + Organization)
- A sitemap
- Patience (10 days)
The tools were the easy part. Making them findable was the real work.
All 36 tools are open source: github.com/alexcoledev/cbt-toolkit
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