Swapit Ranks #1 on Google Search

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

Advertisement

Just Launched: Swapit Alerts

We just updated Swapit with a brand new feature: Swapit Alerts.

You can get the latest Swapit app from Google Play and the App Store or by simply clicking here: http://get.swapit.la/now

In a nutshell, a Swapit Alert lets you receive an instant notification if an item you are looking for pops up in your city. With just 1 click you can create a Swapit Alert.

How Swapit Alerts Work

Let’s say you are looking for a green sofa and you search Swapit. As a matter of fact, there is no green sofa on sale on Swapit right now. With just one click you can create yourself your own customer Swapit Alert on the search term “green sofa”. Now, every time an item gets posted, which matches that search term, you will receive an instant push notification.

Of course, we’ve also put some management capabilities into Swapit, which allow you to easily create more Swapit Alerts or delete an existing alert in case you’ve got what you wanted.

Swapit Alerts Video Demo

Here are some screen shots of how that looks like:

Swapit is the first mobile marketplace that launches such a feature in Asia. We are currently working on even more innovative solutions for our users. The next features are already being implemented while this blog post is being written. So stay tuned and keep an eye out for our next Swapit update!

Have you tried Swapit yet? Give it a try: http://get.swapit.la/now

 

Swapit beta 3 – Launched

After beta 1 in January and beta 2 in February, we launched beta 3 of swapit three days ago.

It took pretty much a full month to get from beta 2 to beta 3 which was slightly longer than expected, but software development always takes longer than expected. If having been in the business for over a decade has taught me one thing then it is that “it’s good to have deadlines, but don’t expect to hold all of them”. Well, we still try our best to hit our targets and we also try to set our targets realistically.

So back to beta 3: We launched this new beta with a set of new features. Based on the great feedback of our beta testers and especially the beta surveys we ran already, we were able to prioritize our feature-roadmap accordingly. That being said, you can be sure if you’re a swapit beta tester that your voice is heard and you have direct influence on the development and feature set of swapit! Wanna join? Just request your invite here: http://swapit.la

Search

Beta 3 introduces full-text search of items. Besides search being one of the most essential features of a buy & sell app, it was also one of the most requested features in our surveys. Hence, it was a no-brainer to prioritize “search” high up in our feature list. Right now, you can search all items by title and the result will be presented to you sorted by distance from your current location. Of course, it is also possible show only your results on the map.

Filters (rudimentary)

As a first we introduced a rudimentary filter that allows you to switch between showing only items that are still available (i.e. sold and unsold) or all items. Eventually, this feature will be expanded into a much richer one allowing more sophisticated filters like price range, product category, seller, and some other filters I’d like to keep a surprise for everyone. If you have any ideas about what kind of filters would make sense to you, please do feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post or write us an email to ideas@swapit.la

Multiple Pictures & Gallery

This is also a rather obvious feature to have, but it is also a very important one. Items that are being offered through swapit need to be presented in the best way possible. Having the possibility to post pictures from multiple angles makes a huge difference. Yet, it is very important to upload such pictures easily during the item posting process — remember, our goal was and remains to allow you to post an item within 30 seconds; including taking photos. That is very important! No fuss! No transferring photos from your phone/camera to your desktop computer to upload them (like you would need to do when posting on Facebook). At the same time, it is utterly important to present a number of item pictures in a beautiful and panoramic fashion. Each post detail view now sports an automatically revolving gallery that after tapping any picture opens up a full-screen picture viewer.

New List Layout

While I am personally not a Pintrest user, their list layout and the way they present their content is absolutely beautiful, logical and has become a layout many folks are familiar with. To ensure our users feel right at home in a beautifully designed app, we have re-designed the item list – which is the first thing users see when they open the app for the first time, and it is the view they will spend most time on. We have borrowed several design concepts from such commonly known list layouts and have applied them to swapit.

We hope you love it as much as we do, but let me assure you one thing: we will keep working on this and improve it bit by bit. So please expect changes and improvements to this over the next betas. Again, feel free to suggest changes if you think they make sense.

Lollipop

Swapit beta 3 has also been fully tested on Android 5 Lollipop now. While an app like swapit should be running easily on any Android version, there are always slight differences between Android versions. It shouldn’t be like that, but it’s just a pure fact that Android is a defragmentation nightmare. Mainly in terms of devices, but to a slight bit also in terms of the OS and its software architecture and design. It’s manageable, though, and therefore, it wasn’t too hard for us to make sure swapit runs flawlessly on the latest Android 5 Lollipop.

Of course, there are many other small features and improvements that went into beta 3, like a new notifications view (for comments and new items), characters left counters for input fields (like in text message or twitter tweet fields), super fast list loading, map view improvements with custom icons, user profile view as well as a ton of bug fixes and small user interface improvements.

We are quite happy with our beta 3 of swapit. We launched it a couple of days ago and two after that we pushed another beta “3.1” out which right away fixed some issued we noticed with beta 3 on some of our beta testers’ devices. That’s what a beta is for, figuring out issues, introducing new features, testing them, getting feedback, and iterate to the next version.

Quality is Paramount.

Thanks a lot to all of our beta testers for their time and effort. We love all of you and your great feedback. We will be in touch with the next beta 3 survey to determine the next steps moving forward.