Financial Calculators in the US: How a Young Project Reached the TOP for Competitive Queries

About the Project

The client operates an online financial calculator platform for the US market, allowing users to estimate after-tax salaries, total tax burdens, capital gains, and state-specific financial metrics.

Our team faced stiff competition in a high-density financial niche where individual state-level pages directly challenge major US portals for top search positions. At the start of the campaign, a significant portion of target queries ranked on the second page or lower, so our experts focused on rapidly building domain authority for the young platform to push key calculator pages into high-visibility search positions.

Objectives

• strengthen the backlink profile of the young website and increase the quantity of high-quality domains
• promote state-specific calculator pages for high-volume queries
• move more keywords from below the TOP 20 into the TOP 10 and higher positions
• distribute link equity among the most promising states
• expand the presence of the project’s pages in AI-generated answers

Our actions

The project’s structure is largely built around individual states. Each page has its own search demand, level of competition, and current ranking, so we distributed the link-building budget unevenly. We gave priority to pages with high search volume and to calculators that were already relatively close to the first page.

Our team paid particular attention to major markets, including California and New York.

We used several formats to build the profile. We selected outreach placements primarily on American resources covering finance, taxes, employment, and HR. They provided thematically relevant links to calculator pages. We used crowd marketing in discussions related to salaries, taxes, and personal finance. Submissions and directories helped expand the young domain’s own profile and increase the number of link sources.

Experts built the anchor distribution with the rapid growth in the number of domains in mind. URLs and branded wording formed the foundation. We added commercial and geo-dependent anchors selectively, primarily to state pages where relevance for specific clusters needed to be strengthened.

Instead of using a fixed distribution for the entire period, the plan was reviewed regularly. We looked at which pages were moving through the search result zones more quickly and where additional reinforcement could have a greater effect. If a calculator moved, for example, from positions 30-40 closer to the TOP 10, it could be supported with additional links at the next stage.

Throughout the work, our experts tracked the project’s AI visibility across several systems: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.

Results

The number of referring domains increased from 374 to 1,002. The profile grew by 628 domains, or approximately 168%.

Organic traffic increased from 1,442 to 8,047 visits. The increase amounted to 6,605 visits (+458%). In fact, over three months, the volume of organic traffic increased 5.6 times.

The number of queries in the TOP 20 increased from 613 to 1,843, more than threefold. At the same time, the number of queries in the TOP 10 increased from 430 to 1,375, or approximately 3.2 times. The TOP 3 showed the most pronounced dynamics: the number of queries in this range increased from 28 to 447, almost 16 times.

The growth also affected AI search results. At the time of measurement, the service recorded around 1.7 thousand appearances of the website in answers across all tracked AI platforms, with an increase of approximately 1.5 thousand answers. The number of pages receiving this visibility reached 333 (+274).

Google AI Overviews showed the most noticeable dynamics: the website appeared in 900 answers, whereas the previous period recorded no such appearances. The number of pages in AI Overviews increased from 0 to 249. AI Mode recorded 399 answers (+282), Gemini recorded 148 (+142), Perplexity recorded 100 (+86), Copilot recorded 102 (+95), and ChatGPT recorded 57 (+31).

At the same time, the number of answers in ChatGPT increased, but the number of source pages decreased from 17 to 10. In other words, the growth in AI visibility was uneven: on most platforms, both the number of answers and page coverage increased, while in ChatGPT, a smaller set of URLs generated a larger number of answers.

The presence in AI Overviews grew particularly noticeably: from zero to 900 answers and 249 pages over the period of cooperation.

Conclusion

During the period of work, our young financial project grew its backlink profile by approximately 2.7 times, boosted estimated organic traffic by 5.6 times, and increased the number of queries in the TOP 20 by more than threefold. The number of queries in the TOP 10 grew by approximately 3.2 times, while the TOP 3 saw an almost 16-fold increase.

The project also significantly expanded its presence in generative search results. The total number of appearances in AI-generated answers reached around 1.7 thousand, while Google AI Overviews grew from zero to 900 answers and 249 pages.

For a project with a large number of GEO-dependent calculators, prioritizing pages based on search potential and current dynamics became an important part of our work. Backed by link building, the website strengthened its position simultaneously in traditional search results and across several AI systems, with the most noticeable growth occurring in the top search positions and the Google ecosystem.