A HireRussians case study
By Eugene Odnoval and Alex Polezhaev
The idea of the HireRussians brand appeared back in 2005 in the minds of then Key-Soft marketing managers. It was a great and unique name speaking for itself – hire Russians! Initially, the HireRussians site borrowed the main ideas from the content of the Key-Soft site but looked different:
Very soon we understood that we can use this new brand more effectively than just another company site. We started to position HireRussians as a guide for services offered by Key-Soft, with clear descriptions and user-friendly navigation.
That’s how the site changed from company-oriented to service-oriented:
Any page of the site shows the range of services we offer. Clicking on the link you choose, you can get more details about that service and the related projects we have accomplished.
Another goal was to simplify the way a customer can contact us. Therefore, the contact form is placed on every page and doesn’t need searching.
Along with changing design and content, we have optimized our campaigns in Google Adwords. We have created a separate campaign for each service with its own Ad Group and its own Text Ad for each keyword (e.g., hire php programmers).
With the new design, the ads performance became a bit worse but still generated good lead traffic.
Trying to make the site and contact with us even more simple, we went for an experiment: a 3-page contact-oriented site just with a brief “about us” description, a contact form, references and a link to our blog (the one you are reading now):
And… conversion became 4 times less effective. It was obvious that visitors didn’t get all answers to their questions. This made us return to the second version of the site. We constantly made minor cosmetic changes to the site, optimized navigation and the way of presenting information (e.g., we utilized the Call2Action approach). Each time we got closer and closer to our visitors. We also carefully tracked every feedback message from our visitors and clients.
In the meanwhile, Key-Soft got renamed into Sibers, we expanded our list of provider partners (Technoart, KG-United, Vito Technology) and expanded the range of our services in order to meet various demands of our customers.
The new version of the site was initially built according to the SEO principles: transparent html code, design separated from content, friendly URLs, keywords in the URL and page title.
The real output, however, came from the highly tailored pages in the right menu: Hire Java Developers, Hire a Developer etc.
Their main point was to match exactly the search query. For example hire java developer – the URL, keywords, title, h1 tags contain these words. Observations make it clear that good search results are shown only on very narrow queries and generate good conversion.
By the way, Google doesn’t understand virtual links. For instance, you can get to https://www.hirerussians.com/hire-developer/ going to https://www.hirerussians.com/hire-russian-programmers/: that’s the same page with different keywords that are automatically inserted there. Even placed these URLs to the sitemap for Google, these URLs aren’t indexed and counted as pages. But visitors from Google Adwords come to such pages with greater pleasure. After all, we optimize the site for people, not for Google. The hint is to make a separate URL for each keyword, and all URLs for that keyword will lead to the “same” page. For example, try https://www.hirerussians.com/hire-c++-developers/ (keyword: C++ developers) and https://www.hirerussians.com/c++-programmer-for-hire/ (keyword: C++ programmer for hire).
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Great, John! At reasonable cost, we’ll be happy to bring your site to perfection and make all links work!