Changing site structure = 66% increase in traffic

TODAY'S HOST

Kevin Indig, Growth Advisor (ex-Shopify, G2, Atlassian)

Why would anyone care about country code top-level domains?

Well, at Shopify we increased website traffic by 66% by moving our international subdomains and ccTLDs to subdirectories in August 2022. Here's how it works:

The debate on the SEO effect of using subdomains, ccTLDs, or subdirectories for your site structure is never-ending. Data favors subdirectories, and the consensus is that they outperform other types of site structure. 

Some believe ccTLDs get more clicks because users recognize their countries, but stats tell a different story.

Still, there are valid reasons to use a subdomain or a ccTLD domain:

• Privacy
• Technical limitation of your CMS
• An understaffed dev team

But, if those problems don’t apply, migrating to a subdirectory can come with a significant SEO traffic boost.

Google says it treats subdomains and subdirectories the same, but the difference is huge: subdirectories (almost always) work better because they inherit authority from the root domain.

At Shopify, we did this while bypassing developer capacity bottlenecks, by making the changes to the URL routing ourselves.

Proper 1-to-1 301 redirects reduced the loss of URL authority to a minimum. The gain of authority, however, outweighed the loss on the URL level by magnitudes.

Take a look at these graphs of global markets from Canada and Brazil:

The same applies to blogs and other forms of content. Moving subdomains and switching ccTLDs to subdirectories will almost always boost your traffic.

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn.

YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF MARKETING UPDATES

Table of contents:

1. Differentiation strategy: how to stand out from the noise

2. How to use experimentation roadmaps for CRO programs

3. Get featured in Growth Notes
4. Building the greatest swipe file

5. Find the best Google Optimize alternative

1. Differentiation strategy: how to stand out from the noise

No business starts out with the goal of blending in. Yet, standing out from the competition is one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs and marketers continue to face.

Never before have we had so many brands out there. The barrier of entry to starting new businesses has never been lower.

Wanting to be different from your competition is one thing, but how do you achieve it?

The answer, in many cases, can be found in creating an effective differentiation strategy.

Read this article to understand why differentiation strategy is so challenging, why so many companies struggle to differentiate because of sameness, and how to create real brand and product differentiation.

Sameness is the default for most companies today. Let’s look at why.

Read the full article.

2. How to use experimentation roadmaps for CRO programs

How do you decide what to test? Conversion research tends to lead to a list of ideas, which you then need to prioritize in a cohesive way.

Like most things in life, conversion optimization benefits from a strong strategic approach.

This includes aligning your goals and resources to build out a roadmap: a framework and process for your experiments.

Your experimentation roadmap incorporates your prioritization framework with some sort of strategic planning of your experiments over a time period.

Building your testing roadmap helps you move from tactical to strategic testing. It also improves your resource planning, enables you to build more complex tests, and gives visibility to other teams on your testing.

This playbook will help you build a roadmap that positions testing at the heart of your organization.

Start increasing your conversion rate by using experimentation roadmaps.

3. Get featured in Growth Notes

Your last real competitive advantage is constant innovation through experimentation at speed.

Submit your experimentation case studies and we will share them with our audience...

• Newsletter (+120,000 readers)
• Social media (+20,000 followers)

Case studies like the one you're about to submit help us educate more marketers on how to achieve speed through experimentation and win.

We will feature the best case studies across all of our channels and pay credits to you.

Submit your case study here.

4. Building the greatest swipe file

The ad of the week comes from Lavender this time. 

What's great about it:

• The hook highlights the value prop with a concise sentence: with Lavender, you can double your reply rates and fasten your workflow.

• The creative is on-brand and plays with the wizardry theme, since Lavender uses AI to fix your emails and increases your chance of getting replies.

Be more like Lavender.

Join us in building the greatest swipe file there is. We will feature the best ads across our different channels with credits to you:

• Newsletter (+120,000 readers)
• Social media (+20,000 followers)

You can submit ads you've created but also the ones others did. We'll pay credits to you anyway for contributing to the marketing community.

Submit your ads here.

5. Find the best Google Optimize alternative

Speero is building the most complete, yet practical, database to compare the available A/B testing tools in the market.

We are doubling down on this initiative to have the first version ready by the end of the month. Vendors will be the first reviewers to ensure accuracy.

We're starting out with 24 tools, including:

• Adobe Target
• Conductrics INC
• Intellimize
• Mutiny
• Optimizely

Sign up here to get notified once the first version is out!

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