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Github's brilliant organic traffic acquisition strategy

5 points by marcamillion 16y ago

marcamillion 16y ago
Might seem obvious to some people, but wasn't obvious to me :)
Swizec 16y ago
While I'm certain most people around here understand that free accounts are an awesome marketing strategy, I don't think this strategy is all that obvious. Now that I think about it some more, the really interesting thing is that many of the most popular sites use a similar strategy (StackOverflow comes to mind). Can this be called SEO? Can't it because it isn't evil?
- marcamillion 16y ago
  That's exactly why I wrote this post. Because on the surface, it seems that a free account is simply a loss leader. But it never occurred to me, to treat it like an 'SEO'/marketing line item on the budget. This is fundamentally a different approach and potentially VERY lucrative. You are absolutely right about SO. When they posted that 80% of their traffic comes from Google, that's when it occurred to me and I then decided to look at Github and see if it is true. Low and behold, when you search for obscure programming terms, Github comes up on the first SERP for many of those terms in the long tail. So it is user-generated organic SEO content (like Digg.com) but much more targeted to their market. Brilliant!
codeslush 16y ago
I'm not sure if I agree with the assertion here. Pure speculation, but I HIGHLY doubt this was their strategy when offering free accounts. I think the primary strategy was to get people to use the product, fall in love with it, then subscribe when in need of a private repo. Naturally, people will want to use the tool(s) they're already comfortable using. Having a kick-butt site, easy to use, and executing like mad-men ---that's what got them so popular and as a result of being so popular and so highly valued, they get SEO in return. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it until someone from Github says different! :-) StackOverflow / EE / etc... - maybe a different story. Why? I don't know - just my feeling! And my feelings are valuable! lol
- marcamillion 16y ago
  I hear you codeslush, and again...that's how it seems on the surface. Maybe that's how they started off, but I suspect that they are now living off of the fruits of an organic traffic generating machine - that was perhaps inadvertently created. Either way, it's an interesting lesson for other web services/webapps to learn.
  - codeslush 16y ago
    Understood - but the lesson to learn, in my opinion, is different. You don't get that organic traffic if you don't have traction and value. So the real lesson to learn is how did they get that traction? It most certainly wasn't from content that wasn't yet created. I can imagine it was difficult for them to get users to commit their code at first - especially when a thousand other code-hosting sites already had significant traction. Your theory holds true for ANY content driven website - from blogs where community provides free content via comments and other sorts of feedback to almost any other valuable website where you've created value and people link to you. It's a wonderful result of what happens when you create value. That's my lesson. I've never created anything of "consumer" value so I could be completely wrong!

5 points by marcamillion 16y ago

Might seem obvious to some people, but wasn't obvious to me :)

While I'm certain most people around here understand that free accounts are an awesome marketing strategy, I don't think this strategy is all that obvious. Now that I think about it some more, the really interesting thing is that many of the most popular sites use a similar strategy (StackOverflow comes to mind). Can this be called SEO? Can't it because it isn't evil?

marcamillion 16y ago
That's exactly why I wrote this post. Because on the surface, it seems that a free account is simply a loss leader. But it never occurred to me, to treat it like an 'SEO'/marketing line item on the budget. This is fundamentally a different approach and potentially VERY lucrative. You are absolutely right about SO. When they posted that 80% of their traffic comes from Google, that's when it occurred to me and I then decided to look at Github and see if it is true. Low and behold, when you search for obscure programming terms, Github comes up on the first SERP for many of those terms in the long tail. So it is user-generated organic SEO content (like Digg.com) but much more targeted to their market. Brilliant!

codeslush 16y ago

I'm not sure if I agree with the assertion here. Pure speculation, but I HIGHLY doubt this was their strategy when offering free accounts. I think the primary strategy was to get people to use the product, fall in love with it, then subscribe when in need of a private repo. Naturally, people will want to use the tool(s) they're already comfortable using. Having a kick-butt site, easy to use, and executing like mad-men ---that's what got them so popular and as a result of being so popular and so highly valued, they get SEO in return. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it until someone from Github says different! :-) StackOverflow / EE / etc... - maybe a different story. Why? I don't know - just my feeling! And my feelings are valuable! lol

marcamillion 16y ago
I hear you codeslush, and again...that's how it seems on the surface. Maybe that's how they started off, but I suspect that they are now living off of the fruits of an organic traffic generating machine - that was perhaps inadvertently created. Either way, it's an interesting lesson for other web services/webapps to learn.
- codeslush 16y ago
  Understood - but the lesson to learn, in my opinion, is different. You don't get that organic traffic if you don't have traction and value. So the real lesson to learn is how did they get that traction? It most certainly wasn't from content that wasn't yet created. I can imagine it was difficult for them to get users to commit their code at first - especially when a thousand other code-hosting sites already had significant traction. Your theory holds true for ANY content driven website - from blogs where community provides free content via comments and other sorts of feedback to almost any other valuable website where you've created value and people link to you. It's a wonderful result of what happens when you create value. That's my lesson. I've never created anything of "consumer" value so I could be completely wrong!