In these series of blogs we are going to analyse and learn how some of the most successful startups in India are using auto generated pages to get insane amounts of traffic every month.
1. CarDekho’s Price Page strategy.
CarDekho is India’s leading car search platform helping users buy cars that are right for them. According to SimilarWeb, CarDekho gets 31.46M visitors every month.
CarDekho’s main pages are targeting keywords that display information about each car. For example, this page displays information about the ‘Hyundai Grand i10’.
Nothing much going on here. Almost all online car players are doing the same where they have specific pages for each car.
Most car websites have the same layout – and it lists everything you’d need to know about the car – the price, key specs, latest updates, reviews etc.
When buying a car, the price is the most important factor, and people do a lot of research on it. On analysing how people search for prices on Google, it shows that they add the city name to each search. For example, someone in Delhi looking for a Maruti Alto tends to type this in Google – ‘maruti alto 800 price in delhi’
Below is the search volume and difficulty for this keyword – ‘maruti alto 800 price in delhi’
This keyword is very easy to rank, but because of the low number of searches you’d think twice about creating a page just for this keyword. But that is a mistake. This is because just like how people are looking for prices in Delhi, there will be an equal amount of searches for prices of cars by car models in different cities in India.
So, instead of just Delhi, you could create ‘maruti alto 800 price’ pages for each different city – different pages for Mumbai, Bangalore, Cochin, Chennai, Hyderabad and so on. And even though the individual search for the Alto in each city is less, the sum of all the cities will be huge, and this would significantly increase traffic to your website.
This is exactly what CarDekho did – creating 385 pages just targeting people who are searching specifically for prices for the Maruti 800 Alto in their city.
This strategy worked – and as the keyword is easy to rank, it gets them around 8200 visitors to their website every month.
Now, replace ‘maruti alto’ with all the other car models + prices + each city, and you have created auto generated pages that drives more than hundred thousand visitors to CarDekho every month.
Maruti Baleno Price page stats:
The beauty of this is that these pages are auto generated, and they target a keyword that has low competition.
Unlike most other competitors in this space, CarDekho has taken this one step further.
If you are searching for the price of a Maruti Alto from Delhi, there is a high probability that you would search for this in Hindi. Or if you were searching for this from Kerala, you could be searching for this in Malayalam. So, CarDekho also auto generated these pages further in multiple regional languages.
These are identical pages to the autogenerated English pages, but in each regional language.
The subgroup of Hindi pages built for ‘Maruti Alto 800’ gets around 4800 organic traffic every month.
The subgroup of Hindi pages built for ‘Maruti Baleno’ gets around 5500 organic visitors every month from just 300 low competition keywords.
Now multiply this same process with hundreds of car models + price + city + regional language, and you have a huge group of auto generated pages that drive thousands of customers to their website every month.
2. Ola’s Outstation Cabs strategy
Ola Cabs is similar to Uber, and allows you to book cabs near you via their app.
The number of people looking for an outstation cab in a city is very low. For example, the keyword ‘pune to mumbai cab’ has only 1200 searches per month.
It’s tempting to skip this keyword because of the low number of searches. But that would be a mistake. For one, this keyword has low competition for SEO and is easy to rank.
Instead of just one page for ‘pune to mumbai’ what if you created multiple pages. E.g. ‘pune to mahabaleshwar’ or ‘pune to lasava’. And instead of just ‘Pune’ what if you did this with every popular city (E.g. ‘Bangalore to Mysore’ or ‘Delhi to Agra’) for travelers in India?
And that is exactly what Ola did. They created pages for each popular inter-city destination. All accompanied with perfect landing pages, with clear CTA buttons encouraging customers to book a cab with them.
The advantage of this is because these keywords have very low SEO competition, they are easy to rank and these pages can be autogenerated by combining cities that Ola operates in.
Ola gets around 40k organic traffic every month JUST from around 57 of these auto generated ‘outstation cab’ pages.
Summary
Ola and CarDekho recognised that they have content to dominate long-tail keywords on Google, and that these pages can be easily auto generated from the backend while building the website. Compare this to the majority of the other companies who have to write blog posts to compete for similar keywords.
How to replicate this for your startup
Right from the beginning (in the ideation stage for your product or service – i.e. before you build you app) – start researching on your main keywords and adjacent, long tail keywords that your customers are searching for on Google. The idea is to create SEO optimised ‘auto generated’ pages for targeting these adjacent and long tail keywords.
Auto generating pages can scale very easily, and as long as they are properly structured (URL structure, on-page SEO) they have the possibility of driving thousands of visitors to your website or app every month with very little effort. And the best part is you already have the content for creating these auto generated pages while you are building your main website or app.
About the Author
Arjun Rajkumar is a developer and online marketing consultant based in Bangalore, India, and he likes building digital products that your customers will love.
