Forwarding Companies
Find the perfect partner for your next shipment in minutes
In last months we continued to improve our DB and software. Google Reviews were aggregated for over 4.5k freight companies. Once this data was published, we saw a 3-5x increase in session duration and pageviews per session.
Organic sessions are growing steadily around 10-15% per month - most valuable metric for us.
In the following period our goal is to work further on data quality and completeness, and to improve UX based on user feedback.
This was unexpected, caught us unprepared to some extend. We received few visits from Google and people started requesting quotes for their shipment! So, great - we are generating leads even before the "real" launch.
First one was to transport a large trade show stand from Spain to Johannesburg, South Africa.
Second one was to ship Mercedes Benz CLA220CDI from Montreal to Kenya. Fun staff!
Our plan was to manually reach out to the relevant freight companies and ask for the quotes. But - O boy! At that point I realized we have wrong contact information in our database of over 4k companies! For months we harvested directors/executives emails, instead of collecting sales department contacts. Directors did not respond to our inquiries, except in case of owner-operated freight companies. So we are now updating contacts in our DB to the more relevant ones as the new quote requests are coming in. Not so fun staff ;)
At this point Google has indexed around 500 pages.
After few months delay, we finally launched: https://forwardingcompanies.com/
At this point we just listed new sitemap at Google and prey it will get indexed soon. In the meantime we were fixing some technical and data problems before we officially launch.
At this point I got the whole team bored with repeating our goals:
- SEO - position our website as high as possible
- Build trust & brand within freight industry
- Insist on highest quality of service to the industry.
We launched a simple one pager landing page to "warm up" our domain name and get some subscribers early on.
In the meantime our biggest investment was collecting data about freight forwarding companies from various sources.
Eventually we grow the database to over 4000 companies.
My agency is working with some of the big names in the freight industry. The more I learned about it, the more I liked it. Trucks, trains, airplanes, boats... Aren't they every boy favourite toys? Also old games like transport tycoon, transport giants - I still love to play them :)
It was so exciding to work on a project were I will connect my passion for freight industry and skills as a developer, SEO specialist and entrepreneur.
Goal is set - to create world largest directory of freight forwarding companies. One that will not suck as the rest of them. It will be a valuable lead generation platform for the industry. It must stay free for both shippers and forwarders.
We will earn our livings through ads, affiliate sales and premium services.
Personally, I wanted to do this right. Avoid any burn outs, rush, conclusions based on assumptions, late hours. Instead focus on prioritising right, keep it simple, validate early, listed to the market, recruit a great team.
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