Content crumpets
Part 6
Fumblings
In Part 5 we got some fast learnings about search engine optimization (SEO) and canned the worst marketing campaign ever.
But now we’ve got a plan to get traffic, and it’s all about content: we’re gonna fill our site with yummy content for search engines to gobble up.
There’ll be some technical tweaks to make that content show up on the site and look at enticing as possible when we share it, and also to make sure we can track its impact.
We’ll also start scheming about how best to get that content out in the wild 🦍 🐘🦁
Where‘s that content gonna go?
Up until Thursday 16th April, our site was built as simply as it could have been. 3 files: one page of HTML, one with CSS, and one with about 100 lines of Javascript.
It was how people built sites 20 years ago.
We wanted content, and that meant some kind of a blog hooked onto the site. I’ll save the details for another post, but I found out on Thursday morning that it’s a pain to add a blog onto the kind of super simple site we had.
Realizing that I’d have to rebuild the site was a tad demoralizing, but it turned out to not be bad at all. I rolled up my sleeves and spent Thursday rebuilding the site using Gatsby and Netlify CMS for the blog.
Luckily I found probably the best template site I’ve ever seen to work from and, as the site was so simple, the job mainly involved initial setup with Gatsby and Netlify CMS and a bit of copy and pasting of the furlough calculator code.
After deploying the site we switched our domain name to point at our new site instead of our old site. I thought it would take a while for the DNS stuff to do it’s magic, but it happened instantly. ️I guess that’s because both sites were deployed on Netlify? No idea 🤷♀
Then we moved the Google analytics tag from the old site to the new one, which also worked instantly. Rad.
Jack Cully had been Shakespearing up a blog post while I worked, and by around 5pm on Thursday the site was rebuilt, live, and had content 🎉
A spot of polish
It’s now been a week since rebuilding the site, and most of the coding work since then has been getting us to feature parity with the other calculators out there.
That meant applying some of my fresh design experience from the earlier posts to add student loans and editable pension amounts into the calc.
We also added the “£x less than normal” insight bubble, which people have been quite positive about.
Hopefully, now there’s very little reason for anyone to use a different furlough calculator (as all the rest are caked in ads and seem to have had little design thought).
As the calculator has changed a bit from the last time we got feedback, we’ve planned to do another round of user research to validate that we’re moving in the right direction, this time with friends of friends, instead of friends.
Making the content beautiful
We found out that there are these things called OG tags, and they make your stuff look nice on social media. Essentially extra bits of metadata that you can pop in your webpages for Twitter, Facebook, etc. to interpret.
It wasn’t immediately clear what the right OG tags to add were. The strategy that led us to the answer was finding a blog post that looked good on Twitter. By right-clicking on the blog post on it’s own site (not the Twitter link) and clicking “view source” we were able to rummage through the meta tags to see which ones it used. Then we stole ’em for ourselves.
Just mentioning because it baffled me for a little while why our posts were looking good everywhere but Twitter: turns out Twitter has its own special tags. twitter:card with a content value of summary_large_image turned out to be the magic one for us.
If you’re wanting to have a crack at making your own content look nice on social, Twitter’s card validator turned out to be a useful tool for testing.
Measuring success
Thing number 2 of the day that I had no idea existed: ✨UTM parameters ✨
These are an easy way to improve the precision of your analytics. For the eagle-eyed among you, I’ve gone back and changed all the links to the site in these blog posts from this to this. The difference is the UTM params.
Hover over the this’ (this’s? thissesses 🐍) and you’ll see that the second one had a bunch of sneaky extra data.
Now, over in our analytics, we can tell what hits are the result of this blog, personal Facebook posts, or all the social media accounts that we‘ll set up further down.
More info on UTM params here. They’re super easy to whip up, no knowledge of coding required.
Filling our site with words
If Google’s going to find us, we’ve got to be choc-full of delicious tasty content.
The strategy for this is to go slow and steady, build up a lot over time. We’re gonna keep rolling out blog posts every day or two to the site and sharing them on social media consistently.
Hopefully, some of those posts will get shared by other people and we’ll start making rumbles around the internet.
One thing that we realized is that Google’s system for SEO seems like quite a virtuous cycle.
If you fill your site with relevant content to the things that your users care about, and those users like it enough to link back to you on their own sites, Google boosts you.
It might sound obvious, but it seems quite cool to me that playing the game is forcing us to build a more useful product for our users.
Spreading that content
Now we’ve got a bunch of content. It looks nice, and we can measure it.
We needed some crumpets to spread that content on, so promptly snapped up @FurloughCalcUK on Twitter, FurloughCalculatorUK on Facebook, and @furloughed_ on Instagram.
For Twitter and Facebook Jack Cully has been making great use of Buffer to schedule social media posts throughout the week with our articles.
Furloughed friend Richard Cook had the idea last week of sharing furlough memes. We agreed it was worth a shot, so memes have become our Instagram strategy. We now strive to be the foremost procurers of furlough memes in the land.
So, what?
So, on the evening of Thursday 16th, the sharing began.
Jack had the idea of following people on Instagram who’d been mentioning the word “furlough”. Two finance influencer-y sorts posted stories about us totally unprompted (the second two accounts in the photo at the top).
That was a cool feeling — the first real validation from a stranger that our product was good.
And then some lines started moving in funny directions.
Next time, in Part 7, Jack chats about where those funny lines went 📈
If you read past the tapir, chances are you read the whole thing. If you dig it, give us a few claps. It’ll help others find this too.
