In this post I’m going to share some of the factors that have helped Blurtit.com increase its traffic from organic search. Many of these common sense techniques are really simple and can be applied to any size website. SEO on large sites is challenging in its scale as it’s not possible to optimise individual items, so we had to find solutions from within the analytics data of the site.
No prizes for guessing from the following analytics graph when we really started to focus on the site:
So what changed at the end of 2008?
We made the site better for the users.
Making a site better for the users is a great way of making it better for search engines, and the multiple benefits are increased traffic, increased page views and happier users.
Breaking down the key improvements:
- Made it easier for users to ask and answer questions through simple interaction with the site
- Highlighted the best content making it easier to find using the data held in the web analytics
- Improved the design, redesigned the site to make it look cleaner and got rid of clutter
- Improved the navigation to give it greater depth
- Focused on the core proposition by retiring “feature creep” features and functions
It’s easy to get lost in the complex developement of site features rather than focusing on what it actually does. Simple is often better.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Really interesting to read the final point –
focus on the core proposition
When I was reading this is sounds obvious but this would be a huge step for many and you really need to have confidence in the core.
Indeed common sense really. Spot the two BGP converts hey!
Well done Tim….nice….but then you know we always focussed on the product:)
Doug
Nice solid tip there Tim.
I have a community website that has suffered badly from feature creep.
I am really considering removing all the chaff and taking it back to its “core proposition” (nice saying btw).
How do you monetize blurtit.com, I have a quick look and found no adverts (although my work might block it). The main thing holding back my further development of said site is a complete lack of ability to monetize it.
Any suggestions?
Chris
@Chris – yes we do have Adsense (and other networks), but, depending on many factors, you may not have seen the ads. To monetize your community may take a different approach, consider monetizing your loyal user base in a different way to the “drive by” traffic.
What do your users love the site for? How can you make that “thing” better? And can you charge for this type of service?
My kids are always on Club Penguin, which I admire for its business model. Any one can join and earn coins, but to spend the coins on cool stuff like pets and furniture for your house, you need to be a paying member. Guess what? Yes all kids want to be a member. Perhaps you could draw some parallels with Club Penguin for your site in a way relevant to your specific demographic?
Thanks for the reply Tim
Adsense doesn’t work on this site as most our traffic is from existing, and loyal, members. We currently run on donations but wanted to offer some kind of premium membership – the hard part is choosing what to offer as premium (dont really want to take anything away thats already there) and make it worth the money!
The other option is to try sell them stuff (the site is in a gaming niche) so could possibly sell video games / consoles etc via affiliates. Have tried this but with limited success.
The club penguin thing sounds good but seems like they found the membership magic; that is something I need to find… the killer feature or “pull” that will make people want to pay!
How to find that killer feature?
Chris, more ideas for your site on the the post here: http://www.timoshea.co.uk/marketing/backofthenet-info-5-ideas-on-making-money-from-a-niche-community/
I think better chat(shout) service can be kept for paid members it should be like Google Talk or Yahoo messenger or something like where user gets his shouts updated on its page automatically after few minutes of standstill without making him refresh the whole page. The site can also offer notifications on profile page from the blurtit.com itself it will keep him real time updated while he is on the site as some users spend their whole day on the site. These are some of the suggestions which we can bring in on the site. You people can remove or ignore(comment) it as you find fit. Hope it helps!