Reviews of mass/mini site development services
Jun 16th, 2009 by Richard
I’m in the process of researching a series of articles on mass and mini site development services.
If you follow me on twitter you might have seen me talking about it already.
Why my opinion matters
Why bother reading my posts? You’re being paid or something right?
That’s a great question. Nope, I am not being paid. I’m sharing my thoughts and opinions based on my own experiences.
We’ve been developing geo domain sites for some time now in the .com and ccTLD space. Geo domains are some of the hardest sites to rank and build traffic for.
We’ve gotten pretty good at to the tune of sites being thousands of pages in size, generating thousands of visitors a day and tens of thousands of top 10 rankings in google. Yes, I said tens of thousands.
Put up or shut up
Another good point. Let’s talk facts for a minute. One great examples of our geo domain work is a site about Oakville Ontario that we built.
This is a site that we took on last summer and took it from no rank in google to position #3 behind the Town’s own sites. The site gets 1000 visitors per day now and 60% are from unique organic search phrases. They’re highly targeted people looking for a business or service in Oakville Ontario. It’s an advertisers dream to buy traffic like this!
The site is about 3,500 pages, completely automated and has unique content added every day. We have engaged the community through social media and by posting their articles and photos on the site.
What do you know about mass development
We built a custom CMS for Oakville.com from the ground up. All pages, titles, slugs etc are created in an SE friendly way with all the SEO goodness built in. Some content is generated automatically while other content is user generated by our visitors and social media interaction is done automatically.
It took us 3 months to build and tune the CMS and add 1,000 pages of content to the site. It took us 2 weeks to rank in the top 10 in google for hundreds of organic phrases.
Now, we can build out new domains in about 5 days with all the SE friendly and SEO bits automatically built right into the content.
There’s a lot of magic going on the background on our CMS that no one talks about. Yes, I am going to continue my 12 part series on geo domain development and, yes, I am going to share all the magic with you guys.
We’re building another 100 sites out this summer and you’ll hear more about them in another series of blog posts. 
Conclusion
So there you go, I’ve set the bar pretty high, I think you’ll agree.
This should be a fun excercise, I hope you follow along !!
Share
Definitely interested in learning more how you do what you do. Mostly interested in learning about spending/$ results/time spent VS. a PPC landing page scenario. How do you see the equation works here? And of course not every domain is worth developing (I don’t think so anyways). At what point it makes sense? Why the Geo focus and not other categories? and what needs to be there to decide this is worth developing for you?
Cheers
Sahar
@Sahar
There really is some magic in picking the right names to build out and then taking the right steps to do it. It really will take me 12 blog posts to explain it all, too.
I recently talked to a friend with a great portfolio who is testing development vs. parking on some domains. I spent a few days looking at his competitors and the ranking factors, then sent him a big fat to-do list. 2 weeks later he had thousands of pages ranked in google in top 10 positions and more money coming in vs. parking.
The site looks great. I really like the directory listings, along with the integration of Google maps.
I have to ask, you get 1000 visitors per day?
I have seen Compete.com be off with my own sites, but 400 vs. 30K seems to be a rather large difference!
@JS
Yes the site really gets that much traffic.
“I spent a few days looking at his competitors and the ranking factors, then sent him a big fat to-do list. 2 weeks later he had thousands of pages ranked in google in top 10 positions and more money coming in vs. parking.”
How did your friend get thousands of pages ranked in Google in 2 weeks? I assume this is for one domain? That would make more sense than thousands of domains.
Also, income is coming from direct advertisers or Adsense?
@Tony
He had a site built but the page structure, content , SEO and internal linking needed some re-working. After he did the fixes and we got a couple themed links from trusted sites, google gave him a full crawl and ranked all the pages.