Posts Tagged ‘seo’

Whether it’s like a LOTR (Lord of the Rings) or a sought after treasure map, WordStream’s latest infographic is a reference list that’s both engaging and useful for explorers travelling the dynamic land of Internet marketing…okay I’m stopping with the map japes before I hit the “here be dragons” references. Japes aside, it is a [...]



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Who would have thought an Australian Driving School, one that started less than 18 months ago, would be getting a mention on TechCrunch within 15 minutes of alerting them to a new blog article?  When we received the email from No Yelling Driving School, I did wonder if perhaps it was linked to a new [...]



Click on the title to view the entire article in Web Analytics World

Who would have thought an Australian Driving School, one that started less than 18 months ago, would be getting a mention on TechCrunch within 15 minutes of alerting them to a new blog article? 

When we received the email from No Yelling Driving School, I did wonder if perhaps it was linked to a new app to help learner drivers prepare for life behind the wheel, but no, the email clearly stated it wasn’t due to them launching the “latest and greatest Facebook app”. 

What had been created was a new userstyle, a Linen Background for Google Docs.

What follows is an example of what you can achieve by using shareable content to gain placement in multiple sites, including high authority ones like TechCrunch. 

Google Docs Background

Google Docs allows you to create and work with documents online, if you are using it daily you may appreciate its clean background, or perhaps you may find it bland and the lack of contrast hard on your eyes. I’ve put before and after screenshots below so you can see what the Linen Background looks like (click to see the images in full size).

We’ve been talking with two of the co-founders Matt Williams and Jasper Boyschau to learn more about how the background came about.

No Yelling is owned and run by three 21 year old Brisbane guys who were less than satisfied with their learning experience. Although they are a driving school, Jasper describes them as young and passionate about minimal design and modern tech; and they try and incorporate this as much as possible into No Yelling.

Matt is described by Jasper as having “some minor OCD” when it comes to the interface design of apps and software that he’s using regularly, so one day, inspired by iOS and OSX UI Design, Matt decided to put a simple background on Google Docs.

Enter the lightbulb moment…Matt realised that there would be others who’d appreciate this simple addition to Google Docs and this background would enable the team to levarage this shareable content to their SEO benefit.

“We had been struggling to find our niche piece of content. Suddenly here it was.”

Jasper handles all of No Yelling’s online marketing, he took the resulting blog post ad submitted it to 30 high authority blogs, including TechCrunch and that’s when it got really busy.

The Impact

No Yelling were already ranking number 1 for their major keywords, so they haven’t gained major jumps in their primary keyword rankings, but they did see the impact in traffic analytics and believe that their minor keywords will gain from the links and increased traffic.

Being able to gather analytics is a key part of SEO; in one day the team saw a site traffic increase of over 1500%, then when Smashing Mag tweeted their story, they saw a second spike of 1400%. 

Using Majestic SEO program, Jasper can establish that they gained over 100 links back to the site’s home page (noyelling.com.au) and a large number to the page that held the actual user style. Jasper sees these links back to their site as the main benefit; contributing towards the site’s domain authority. This will be of help as the team are starting their Sydney driving school in next few months.

The team did admit to not anticipating the spike in traffic through social media/sharing and so missed out on making the most of this initial increase in traffic by not including social sharing buttons. A mistake they won’t be repeating in the future!

The future – Team Hustlebot Assemble!

This isn’t where the story ends as the Linen Background project made them realise that they’d a lot more to share and a core team of 5 formed Hustlebot, who have been working on another release and along with that the release of the Hustlebot brand. The five are:

•  Matt Williams – Founder, Ideation
• Jasper Boyschau (myself) – Online Marketing, PR
• James Gemmell – Project Manager, Copywriter
• Tarik Menzies – Business Development
• Jake Reston – Designer

Although Hustlebot has emerged from the SEO attempts on No Yelling, this brand is separate to the driving school and is on a mission to make Google products better. The next release in the team’s sights is a new GMail style aimed to make it “beautiful”. GMail has 300 millions users so if HustleBot can come up with a theme that’s useable and shareable, they may find that it gets even busier!

We’ve embedded Hustlebot’s first teaser video at the end of this post, I’ve enjoyed talking with Matt and Jasper and will be watching out for their next release!