Increased Organic Traffic for HungryGoWhere

DROVE ACQUISITION OF 117.5K NEW USERS FOR HUNGRY GO WHERE IN 30 DAYS

Background

HungryGoWhere is a food and restaurant review website, acquired by Singapore Telecommunications Limited, Singtel in May 2012. The food portal has food and culinary guides and videos, along with user-generated reviews of restaurants and dishes.

Challenge

HungryGoWhere was seeing plateau of organic users to its portal. HungryGoWhere couldn't afford to lose search traffic as people usually use search engines to find restaurants. With search being key contributor of traffic in addition to the direct traffic and search traffic declining, HungryGoWhere onboarded Xerago to help on this.

Solution

As part of Xerago's Digital Marketing services' organic traffic generation, Xerago started with an assessment of current techniques followed for search engine optimization. Assessment revealed the below.

A lot of toxic backlinks were hurting search engine ranks
Scope for optimization of meta title, keywords and description
Proper handling of 301, 302 redirects and custom 404 pages
Broken and orphan links
Existence of content cannibalization i.e.) more than one page competing for same keyword
Huge scope for on page optimization and off page optimization

Based on the assessment, Xerago created a sound SEO strategy comprising of technical, content, structure and UX level on page optimization activities and domain authority strengthening, backlink creation and content creation and publishing strategy as part of off page optimization. A competitive benchmarking was done prior.

Based on the strategy, Xerago executed the below.

Site wide schema fixes
Page load time optimization on priority pages
No follow removal and ugc addition
Disavowed 1275 poor backlinks in month 1 of engagement
Proper organization of folder structures
Created off page promotions for top 50 bookable IBL pages
Fixed wrong canonical issues on mobile
301 redirection for all non www pages to www pages
Fixed 404 header status for broken/non-existent page on HungryDeals
Fixing of duplicate titles
Developed and published articles to earn backlinks

Results

As a result of Xerago's interventions,

Number of users increased by 37% in just 6 months
Just before Covid 19 induced lockdown, our efforts yielded 117.5K new users in a single month.
HungryGoWhere recorded maximum number of users (8,91,290) in the month