4 ms·

Love this dude - great idea!

xur17 13y ago
Thanks, really appreciate it! It's been my side project for about 2 years now. It really started to take off at the beginning of this year when I started to rank well for relevant keywords. This past summer, I switched domains to make it more memorable, and my ranking suffered pretty severely. My rank in Google search never recovered, but my traffic from other sources / direct traffic has increased quite substantially such that this doesn't matter anymore.
- jonotron 13y ago
  What was the old domain name?
  - xur17 13y ago
    http://abiteofpizza.com http://abiteofpizza.com Google analytics showed a decent amount of traffic from users searching for asliceofpizza, abitofpizza, etc, and I talked to some users that indicated they had trouble remembering the domain. Bought the new domain for ~$600 over the summer. My direct traffic has increased a lot since then, so I'm inclined to say it helped.
    - halcyondaze 13y ago
      You redirect properly + submit to Google, etc? A proper redirect + submission should see a dip then recovery, not a persistent dip.
      - xur17 13y ago
        Yeah, I did a 301 permanent redirect (the redirect is still there too), redirecting each page to the correct corresponding page on the new domain. I also told Google about the redirect through the webmaster's console. I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it. If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.
        tmzt 13y ago
        Have you considered working with local pizza shops or recruiting a "virtual" sales force to do that for you? Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out. So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places. For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
        xur17 13y ago
        You read my mind! That's my next plan for expansion, I'm just trying to decide how to approach it. A lot of the visitors to the site are budget conscious, so I'd really like to have coupons, etc for them (even if they aren't as good, etc), but people have mentioned that they'd love to have more local stores. My current ideas are: 1. Use the yelp api to add local pizza stores to the current site - this is probably the easiest way to keep the database up to date. I could then reach out to local pizza stores, and try to get some promotions added. The biggest challenge with this is keeping the promotions for local pizza places up to date as a single person working on this. One idea is to somehow encourage users to 'adopt' a local store, and keep the promotions up to date for that local store. Still trying to decide if there's a good way to do that. 2. Make the local pizza places a separate site / app and push users to use it for just finding local pizza places, less about finding coupons, and run it next to the current site.
        halcyondaze 13y ago
        Feel free to shoot me an email at kevin at supremestrategies.com and I'll see if I can root out what might have caused it :)
        xur17 13y ago
        Will do! I'll send you an email later tonight with more details. I really appreciate the help.
        justadude 13y ago

xur17 13y ago

Thanks, really appreciate it! It's been my side project for about 2 years now. It really started to take off at the beginning of this year when I started to rank well for relevant keywords. This past summer, I switched domains to make it more memorable, and my ranking suffered pretty severely. My rank in Google search never recovered, but my traffic from other sources / direct traffic has increased quite substantially such that this doesn't matter anymore.

jonotron 13y ago
What was the old domain name?
- xur17 13y ago
  http://abiteofpizza.com http://abiteofpizza.com Google analytics showed a decent amount of traffic from users searching for asliceofpizza, abitofpizza, etc, and I talked to some users that indicated they had trouble remembering the domain. Bought the new domain for ~$600 over the summer. My direct traffic has increased a lot since then, so I'm inclined to say it helped.
  - halcyondaze 13y ago
    You redirect properly + submit to Google, etc? A proper redirect + submission should see a dip then recovery, not a persistent dip.
    - xur17 13y ago
      Yeah, I did a 301 permanent redirect (the redirect is still there too), redirecting each page to the correct corresponding page on the new domain. I also told Google about the redirect through the webmaster's console. I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it. If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.
      - tmzt 13y ago
        Have you considered working with local pizza shops or recruiting a "virtual" sales force to do that for you? Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out. So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places. For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
        xur17 13y ago
        You read my mind! That's my next plan for expansion, I'm just trying to decide how to approach it. A lot of the visitors to the site are budget conscious, so I'd really like to have coupons, etc for them (even if they aren't as good, etc), but people have mentioned that they'd love to have more local stores. My current ideas are: 1. Use the yelp api to add local pizza stores to the current site - this is probably the easiest way to keep the database up to date. I could then reach out to local pizza stores, and try to get some promotions added. The biggest challenge with this is keeping the promotions for local pizza places up to date as a single person working on this. One idea is to somehow encourage users to 'adopt' a local store, and keep the promotions up to date for that local store. Still trying to decide if there's a good way to do that. 2. Make the local pizza places a separate site / app and push users to use it for just finding local pizza places, less about finding coupons, and run it next to the current site.
      - halcyondaze 13y ago
        Feel free to shoot me an email at kevin at supremestrategies.com and I'll see if I can root out what might have caused it :)
        xur17 13y ago
        Will do! I'll send you an email later tonight with more details. I really appreciate the help.
      - justadude 13y ago