A recent episode of the Indie Hackers podcast, Fame, Focus, and Billions of Pageviews with Evan Britton of Famous Birthdays focused on the story behind a website called Famous Birthdays. The overview is in part as follows:
Evan Britton runs a massive website focused on digital celebrities called Famous Birthdays. It gets multiple billions of pageviews a year, has dozens of employees, and he bootstrapped it to profitability without raising a dime from investors. They key to Evan’s approach is his laser focus.
What was most striking about this interview was how many times on-site search was cited as a reason for the site’s success. Evan mentioned time and time again that the reason he was able to build and grow his website into a massive success was because he observed on-site search behavior of his visitors.
When a visitor of your site performs a search, they are telling you exactly what they’re looking for. There is no amount of targeted advertising that’s going to accomplish that feat.
By observing trends in on-site visitor searches, Evan was able to react accordingly and press into the content that his visitors were actively looking for.
SearchWP fully stands behind observing on-site search behavior and using it as a primary actionable data stream for you to observe. It’s taken so seriously in fact that there is a SearchWP Extension fully devoted to help you analyze your on-site search Metrics!
The podcast interview is great, and if you haven’t been utilizing SearchWP’s Metrics or Statistics to analyze the search patterns of your visitors, you can start today!
