Building a Search Directory Isn't As Easy as You'd Think
I did SEO, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into LOL
For this week, I just wanted to share my experience (so far) with building a search directory.
Not just a directory with no consequence, but a directory with traffic and direct results with what we tweak.
I’m not going to talk about the technical aspects behind the scenes but more on the experience.
We recently built a doctor’s directory so patients in the Philippines can find their doctors and book an appointment online.
Since I’ve been doing SEO for a couple decades at this point, I thought it would be easy for me to figure it out and play around with it and bring the searchers the results they need and deserve.
Let’s just say I was in for a great challenge. I have to give my hats off to those handling search. It’s not an easy thing to do that’s for sure.
Here are some tips I’ve come up so far with the month that I’ve had working on this:
I would definitely take the route of trying out 1 change at a time. Give it time before you try another thing. Gather enough data to back your theories.
If you’re directly working with the product team, I highly suggest having the proper analytics in place to track what you’re doing and see if the results are good.
If possible, try to be in touch with the searchers. We do (and are still doing it daily) live work with the actual people that will use it or already using it. We’ve gathered a lot of insights on what the searchers are looking for and what results are relevant for them and what would lead to better trust & CTR.
Understand that the people you hire to man the positions might not grasp the full concepts of search yet. Technically, yes, but the concept of bringing the searcher the result, that may take a bit of time to explain and get across. If you’ve been trying to optimize for search with Google, you’ll start to pick up different things that you will factor in. This is the same case with your own search directory, it needs to rank what’s important and relevant… so it’s your job to figure out what factors affect that and how to “score” it. Like in everything, it’s a work in progress, keep testing.
If you want organic traffic, you definitely n eed to know the structure and on-page SEO. Should it be perfect right at the start? Of course not, our isn’t but optimize as soon as you can.
SPEED is everything. If it’s not as fast as Google, don’t bother.
Mobile view is key. Make sure your mobile views are light and fast. Make it fit in devices and be intuitive enough because you’ll be facing a ton of differing behaviors. That’s why you need to keep testing your UI and UX.
That’s it for now, maybe in a few more months, I can share some more insights. :)
Drop me a DM and say Hi. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.