Let’s Get Started on Geo Domain Development
Feb 16th, 2009 by Richard
In the summer of 2008, we got our hands on a city.com domain with great potential.
The city is waterfront, has a high median income, high real estate values, six figure population (aka visitors) and about 10,000 businesses (aka advertisers).
The previous owner of the domain had problems with building sticky content for visitors, making money from advertisers and getting ranked in the SE’s.
We understood the cause of these problems and set out to address them with a complete redevelopment of the site.
Pre Development Stats
When we got the domain in August of 2008, the domain had the following stats:
pages in google: 190
monthly visitors: 9,000
newsletter subscribers: none
rank for top phrases: none
monthly unique google searches: few
percent of visitors from type-in vs. SE’s: 80/20
The site was made up of a few pages of unique content and a community message board.
We identified the problem areas and set out to expand the site to 1,000 pages of content with several sections of sticky content to give the advertisers value and keep visitors coming back for more.
Post Development Stats
After five months of development, the site has following stats:
pages in google: 2500
monthly visitors: 30,000
newsletter subscribers: 800
rank for top phrases: hundreds in the top 3
monthly unique google searches: 15,000
percent of visitors from type-in vs. SE’s: 40/60
To get to this point, we added thousands of pages of content that visitors are looking for, added sticky features such as news, events, classified ads and a photo gallery.
We also geo-taggged all the content and added a killer search tool.
Visitors love the new search tool. They can search for an address, or street intersections and get a page with nearby stores, parks, schools etc all shown on a google map.
And the best part of all? The sites is completely automated. One person administers this site and several others.
The Results After Development
From the stats above you can see that we have tripled the monthly visitors to the site and now rank in the top 3 for hundreds of search phrases. We also rank in the top 10 for thousands of long tail phrases, which is why we are getting 15,000 unique searches a month from google.
We’re adding fresh content to the site every day (mostly through automation and user generated). The result is that google visits the site 2 times per day to update it’s index with the fresh content. So when we add a new business listing (advertisers) we’re ranking in the SE’s within 24 hours for the new business name/terms.
How great is that. The advertisers love it!
[This article is PART 1 of a multi-part series sharing an inside look at the start to finish development of a city.com domain. Future articles will cover content generation, automation, SEO, linking, revenue, ranking and more]
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You’ve certainly established your credentials with this post! I look forward to your series.
Thanks Jeff! I’ll be posting step by step details in the rest of the articles. Feel free to ask for more details if I leave anything out.
Good Luck with the development!
I havent got to that stage yet - Im currently moving lots of my domains over to minisites to see what the Revenue is like on Adsense before taking that big step of actually developing and going out to find advertisers!
Best Of Luck!
Regards,
Robbie
Robbie, I think you’re going to see the power of full scale development once I post all the articles.
Well done! But why are you not naming the site?
David, the domain name will appear shortly. I am laying out the foundation in a few articles first!
Rich — congrats
What were the costs though in order to triple the traffic and build long term growth with all this content?? What type of initial upfront investment did this involve?
$,$$$
$$,$$$
?
Mike
Mike,
There was labour involved to build the site and also create some initial content. But we have staff resources already in place who did the work.
When I am done posting all the articles, I think it will be clear that if you have many domains to develop - perhaps a related network of sites - then going this route will be tough to start with the first site and then smooth sailing with the rest of the sites.
Nice article and info, Richard; thanks.
Looking forward to the complete series.
Have you joined (or will you be joining) Associated Cities?
Very interesting post. Looking forward to seeing more articles and also the site. I’m just about to get started on a Geo site and to be honest it’s quite daunting.
Thanks Richard. Look forward to the series.
What is meant by “geo-tagged all the content” - having the location name in photo and video file names?
Is the method of automated content RSS newsfeeds?
@Phil,
Yes we have the GPS points for all listings so that they can be mapped easily and also so that we can show what’s nearby to a business, so that we can offer searches by street address and also searched by street intersections.
The automated content is done with RSS and several other ways as well.
More articles will be ready later this week!