CliqBlog

Why yes, that is an R. Kelly reference.

We’ve been working steady on the latest CityCliq redesign for months now and we’re really, really excited about it. Besides a sleek new look and feel, our sign-up process is easier and more user-friendly than ever. We’ve set a launch date for this Friday so look for a post outlining new features and things to expect down the road.

So, we made another SEO-boosting change a few weeks ago by removing the word "Category" from the business listing page titles. The search engine bots only read up to a certain character count and the word "category" wasn't likely to come up in people's searches for events or businesses anytime soon. Gone!

That said, my new goal as the Chief Analytics / SEO geek around here is to get our site visits over 250 per day, every day of the week. We've come really close in the last few weeks, but we still dip down into the 230 range on the weekends. (Sidebar: Why don't people search for businesses on the weekends? Weird...) I'd like to see this average hold steady for a while before we start looking to the 500s and upward.

Our development team is hard at work on the CityCliq re-write, which will strip out a lot of our broken / unnecessary features on business listings (like relationships, staff and customers) and give us a lean product to re-launch. On the development side, it should make it easier to add features down the road. From a user's perspective, the page will be less cluttered and noisy. And while we're on usability, the "too-slick-for-their-own-good" in-place edits on the business listing pages are on their way out, too. While they seemed impressive to all of us at the showcase, the feedback we've received indicates that most users are confused by them.

So, inspired by recent readings of Nielsen and Krug, we begin our first round of usability testing on the new homepage and business edit pages in about 2 1/2 weeks. This will be enough time for the first re-write to be completed as well as for our test protocol and tasks to be designed. This all bodes very well for CityCliq users and customers. Exciting stuff!

We'll be posting more about testing and usability in the next few weeks. Until then, ciao!

A few days ago, I went through the CityCliq Analytics report for Wednesday, January 30th. I performed searches on the first fifty of the 285 organic Google searches that hit the site. I broke the search results down by percentage per position rank. I wanted to share the stats and talk about them for a bit.

1. 10%
2. 26%
3. 18%
4. 4%
5. 2%
6. 2%
7. 10%
8. 2%
9. 2%
10. 2%

Subsequent Pages = 20%

The awesome news about this is that 60% of the results were “above the fold,” meaning that they were in the top five positions and that users didn’t have to scroll down to see them. 20% were in the bottom half of the page and another 20% were on subsequent search pages.

In most cases, we ranked higher than Yellowbot, one of our huge competitors in the Internet Yellow Pages arena.

Search types were predominantly business names in quotes (i.e. "nick's pizza"). Other types sought for, in order of popularity: phone numbers, addresses, businesses + cities, businesses + reviews, and photos of cities.

What's most exciting about all of this is that our page title tweaks across scene and business pages seem to be drawing a lot more search results than they previously were. One of the things that we thought would help our SEO would be adding city names to the page titles. Because of the increase in local search over the last few years, and because our aim is to help small businesses reach more of their local customers, it only made sense to add a little more depth and attractiveness to the descriptions.

That said, as we gain more and more customers, we'll be coaching them on things they can do to boost their rankings in search engines. We've built up a solid reputation with some of the majors and we hope to get better every day.

Well, the first test mailings have gone out and performed reasonably well. We've seen site traffic reach all-time highs in recent days. This is partly due to direct traffic from the solicitations and partly due to increased search engine referrals. A few key changes: we updated page titles on Scenes and Business listings to include city and state names. Since most folks who have been referred via SERPs are performing local search, our thinking was that we should go ahead and provide additional context for the keywords and up a business's chances of being found. On that note, we're in the process of creating a business owner-friendly crash course in SEO. Our aim is to explain - in terms as succinct and easy to understand as possible - how SEO works and why a business owner should care. It's something that a lot of local search outfits gloss over in their marketing efforts. Our thinking, though, is that since we're giving business owners a chance to create and enhance their listings, why not give them a chance to really juice them up and place even higher in search results? We'll cover keywords, descriptions, addresses, phone numbers and other minutiae that really seem to help boost SEO. We've got high hopes. And we're excited to be moving ahead.

I just read a great article from Chris Silver Smith on the Search Engine Land site. It's directed mainly toward business owners whose listings appear on online directories and gives some really good tips on how to make your listing stand out, both on a site and on search engine result pages (SERPS).

So, since our test mailing has gone out and we've got a few days until folks start activating their business profiles, I thought I'd sum up some of Smith's key points. Soon, we'll be fleshing these points out and making them into a guide for business owners. It'll be easily accessible on the site and should be helpful to optimizing their web presence. Let's get to it:

Business Name:
Your business name is important on a number of levels. It's part of your brand, your representation, and it helps people find you. When listed online, though, your business name should include keywords that people search for. this will help you pop up earlier on SERPs.

Business Address:
Be careful to spell your address properly, as well as to make sure that appropriate North, South, East and West versions of your street are included. If your business doesn't have an address, use a PO Box address. This can aid your search results immensely.

Also, be sure to use the proper name of your city as opposed to nicknames. If you're unsure, it always helps to check Google or other search engines to see how your city is listed.

Phone Number:
Include your fax numbers or alternate phone numbers in your listing. And, if you have one, don't include your vanity number (i.e. 1-800-PLUMBER) as this isn't likely to help your search results at all.

Business Description / Tags / Taglines/ Keywords:
These fields are really, really important. You want to be as descriptive as possible so that people searching for the kinds of goods or services that you offer can actually find you. If your heading is under "Attorneys," for example, you may want to include Lawyers in your description to help expose you a little more.

CityCliq automatically includes your business's name, city, state and category in your page's title, which is one of the first things that the major search engines read when placing you in search results. Repeat this and other information in your description, as it can help boost your rankings tremendously.

I'll cover the rest of the tips in forthcoming posts.

We're in the final stages of testing and looking forward to receiving our first responses from the mailing. Things are looking tight on the site. The team has stepped up and created an amazingly easy-to-use process for business sign-up as well as some pretty slick UI for the rest of the registration. We're super excited to see the results and I hope to be posting some news in the coming days. 'Til then, rest your heads, weary folk, and get ready rumble.

We've almost got the business sites functioning for the first round of testing. The boys were up late last night plugging away and Clay and I are tweaking the last little bits of copy and design for the landing, activation and transition pages. We're taking off for a long Thanksgiving weekend and returning on Monday for more testing, tweaking and etc. Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!

First of all, if you're an avid CliqBlog reader (and who isn't?) you may have noticed that all but one of the previous blog posts are gone. I have them all sitting on my desktop in a Pages file, but I can't open it. I hope to remedy this soon. There was some really fascinating stuff in there.

The daily stand-ups have been going really well. There seems to be a greater sense of accountability within the team as a whole. And when you're working against the deadline that we are, accountability, flexibility and efficiency are key. The test mailing is on November 26th, so we'll get to see just how effective our newly designed landing pages are for each side of the business in the early part of December. It's an exciting time.

On the development side, the credit card processing is almost complete. On content, we've been plugging away at Scene creation and making sure that we have a fairly even distribution of them among the cities. Since a lot of businesses that we're mailing to are in smaller or mid-sized cities, we're trying to make sure that we have content for visitors as soon as they hit the site, no matter where they're located.

Design of the landing pages is almost complete, as well. Jam.

CityCliq.com is back up and running with a slightly cleaner design and some feature changes. Here's the lowdown:

In the short term, focus has been redirected to business pages. In an effort to provide businesses with the services we've been planning for months, we're aiming to have the core functionality in place by the end of next week. This means that businesses will be able to establish their account, customize their CliqSite and be online within a matter of minutes. Our SEO is currently resulting in 2nd or 3rd place Google finishes for business searches, so we feel confident that the site will be attractive to business owners looking to increase their web presence.

The creative team and project management hashed out some new Scene and profile page wireframes and mock-ups a month or so ago, so we'll be looking to get them in place after the business side is up and running. Scene content has skyrocketed to over 10,000 Scenes across the country. We're still coming up with new ones and adding them everyday. It's been fun trying to come up with both interesting and marketable Scene concepts with which to seed the site.

That said, the look and feel of the site will be considerably different in the next few months. We've done away with the Nubian font across the board. We've also made notes on how we can restructure and/or tighten up every page on the site. As it is, the design of CityCliq is much "bigger" than we want it to be. We're looking to rein in our layouts and provide a much cleaner, less cluttered experience for every user that visits and joins the site.