Keeping Things Fair In Our Search Rankings
In the world of web development and Search Engine Optimization (known as "SEO" for short), there's a long-running joke that goes;
"The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google".
There's a reason for that. When was the last time you went to page 2 of Google? Or even scrolled past the first 10 results of a question you asked Google (or Bing)? Exactly. According to research by WifiTalents, approximately 75% of all search engine users do not go beyond the first page of search results when looking things up and sites that move from page 1 to page 2 see as much as a 67% drop in traffic. So you could go from 1000 daily visitors to your website to less than 330!
What does this have to do with Braiders Near Me?
Braiders Near Me is a service that allows users to find hair styling professionals in their cities/local communities at the press of a button. Much like Google, you could say it serves as a search engine in a way. Simply ask it to find beauty professionals in a particular city or region and the results are presented to you. Knowing this, we realized how quickly things could become unfair for businesses that signed up subsequently since, by default, the results for all searches were always ordered according to the day a business joined the site [starting from the oldest]. So based on what we know so far, we could end up in a situation where almost 75% of all customers were directed to the first few businesses registered on the platform!
How We Made It Fair
We set out to create this platform to provide people in Canada with a way to find and connect with stylists more easily however, one thing we wanted to avoid, was turning into gatekeepers or even worse, a racket in the sense of using the platform to milk profits out of businesses. By this we mean we did not, do not and will never charge businesses to be listed on the platform nor will we implement any sort of "prioritized" search results. Simply put, you can't pay your way to the top of search results! What we have done, however, is implemented a technique where we always randomize the search results each time a user requests a list of braiders and stylists in a region. This way, the chances of a few businesses dominating the top of searches are almost non-existent allowing for fair competition. See the image below for an example of a search for braiders in Toronto, Ontario yielding the same results but in a different order.
As you can see, the results get shuffled for the same searches to prevent any one business from becoming dominant. This improves fairness on our platform.
Ongoing Improvement
Obviously, the solution is more complex than simply shuffling the results each time a user makes a search. For instance, in a large city like Toronto, having a location closest to the customer is absolutely an advantage that a business should be able to capitalise on. With this in mind, we're working on how to order results by proximity to customers so they know whose close and can expand their search as they go. We believe this is more reflective of a real-life scenario where people tend to go to the closest store/business when looking for a service or product. Another improvement will be adding the ability to save/favourite a braider. This way, the shuffling doesn't affect clients you've already worked with. They can simply log into their accounts and go to the list of their favourite stylists. This, and many other features are currently in development as we work to improve the platform so, if you're already a business owner/professional registered with Braiders Near Me, follow us on our Instagram page to stay posted. Not registered? Register your business here. We'll be sharing ways to improve your search engine rankings with Google and other search engines as well as how to write compelling descriptions for your dedicated page on Braiders Near Me.