For every business it is important to a Google Search ranking that is as high as possible, so everyone who “googles” your name, will be able to find it right away.
CHOOSING THE NAME SWAPIT
When we launched Swapit, we actually weren’t quite sure if “Swapit” was the best name for us. While there several reasons for going with “Swapit”, we also knew that the name is not very original. It is comprised of the verb “swap” and the pronoun “it”. Both such terms are very general and combining both does not create a unique term. So we could not guarantee that we would end up ranking #1 when searching for “Swapit” on Google.
RANKING ON GOOGLE SEARCH
Yet, we managed to get our website http://swapit.la rank #1 for the term “Swapit” in the end. Moreover, our online properties or pages related to us, now take up 8 out of the first 10 results on Google Search. Have a look:
HOW WE DID IT
Content. We meticulously composed content on all of our online properties to match our product as close as possible, while ensuring we keep using a similar style and vocabulary, which allows search engines to find related websites and content easier.
Online Media Sites. Furthermore, we’ve reached out to many websites with high PageRanks. Once they wrote about us, our name made its way on the Google search index – even though it is on their website. Very good examples for that are W Hub, StartupsHK and ButterBoom. A big thanks to all of them again at this point. Your coverage is much appreciated!
Customer Support. Every time a customer sends us an email, he receives an instant reply email with a support case number and our social media links in the email signature. That same signature also comes with every email reply from us. That looks like this:
--
{fullname}
{email}
Swapit Download: http://get.swapit.la
Follow us on
Twitter: http://twitter.com/swapitla
Facebook: http://fb.com/swapitla/
Swapit Corporate Site: http://swapit.la
Swapit Startup Blog: http://blog.swapit.la
As a result, every customer has really quick ways to follow us on social media, check out our website, or just forward one of our URLs to their friends.
Email Marketing. Everyone who is using Swapit, knows we are sending some emails from time to time. We give tips on how to sell your items on Swapit quickly, announce new features and run surveys. Each of those emails also links back to our website, Facebook page, Twitter account and our blog. As you can see, it’s really easy to click any of those and find out more about Swapit. Every time, a customer goes to any of our online properties, we have one more chance to engage with them again. As a result, it a lot more likely that they share one of our links in some of their own conversations on the web. So in the end, that increases our PageRank on search engines like Google.
In-App Links. Inside the Swapit app, it also very easy to reach our website or blog with just one click of a button. Through our in-app analytics, we can see that some people are actually using these buttons to find out more about us. That’s great and definitely one of our intended use cases for them. Besides having a positive effect in terms of page visits and blog views, it also important for us to be transparent. It is important that our users know, who is running the Swapit marketplace and that they can trust us and our expertise in the market.
THE MISSING PIECE or WHERE IS THE BLOG?
You might be wondering, where our blog in the list of search results is. At least, I was definitely looking for that! It only comes in at rank #2 on page 2. That’s definitely too far down and not acceptable — especially, when I am considering how much valuable and unique content we have on our blog.
While we have http://blog.swapit.la as a dedicated sub-domain for our blog, it does actually run on WordPress.com under the URL: https://swapitblogit.wordpress.com
As a result, Google considers all content of our blog not to be related with our website swapit.la. That means, the content written here on our blog, does not help our main website in terms of PageRank.
It appears, this is a point where we can still take action and rather quickly be able to bring a whole set of rich content to be considered part of Swapit’s main domain’s content. We’ll look into that part and see what we can do on that front.
CONCLUSION
Generally, our Google search ranking seems to be quite good. While I am still just talking about the “Swapit” search term, it is still a great achievement that we rank so high – given the fact that (1) the term “Swapit” is rather general / common, and (2) there are other sites out there that exist for a much longer time. Yet, we have outperformed them already.
Let’s see what the future brings. Every new blog post should and will (soon) have a direct effect on our ranking on search engines like Google Search.
Have you tried Swapit yet? It’s free. Get it from: http://get.swapit.la/now
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