DROVE NEW USERS FOR HUNGRY GO WHERE

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
  • 16 of targeted keywords rank in top 3 positions
  • 203 targeted keywords rank on the first page
  • 257 keywords rank on the first and second pages