Feedback Army - Results

The results have come in (amazingly quickly I should add, within 30 minutes) from my Feedback Army submission. Here are the thoughts that I can take away from the feedback:

1. Many users understood what the site was about relatively quickly. This is good news, though not critical, since my use case involves people finding the site through Google, already knowing what they are looking for. Though there were a number of requests to give a better explanation of what the site does up front.
   
2. The tip that is supposed to make it easier to for cell and Skype users to call by using a "+" appears to the confusing people. This needs to be rethought.
3. Design-wise, there seems to be a recurring desire to make the site shinier and more colorful. This is getting a bit worrying, as I keep hearing this. My key differentiation from my competition is the ease of use and the simplicity. If that isn't effective, I'm in trouble.
   
4. More support for showing the results inline, not on a separate page.
5. Suggestion to rename the submit button to "Lookup".
6. Request for a reverse code lookup feature.
7. Request for the "enter the phone number" feature
8. Confirmation that most people use Google to find country codes

Action items:

1. Change the button to just "Lookup"
2. Rethink the design
3. Add to development roadmap a "Reverse country code lookup" feature, though I'll plan on keeping that simple
4. Remove the "+" tip and think it

Short term plans

Here is where I plan to focus the next few weeks:

• Review results from the Feedback Army submission, decide if I'm on the right track.
• Focus on word of mouth marketing, getting more links back to the site. Submit to HN and Reddit potentially.
  
• Refocus on SEO, potentially creating an account on SEOMoz. Determine if I'm focusing on the right keywords, and optimize that effort.
  
• Add support for localization in a couple countries, if nothing else in the auto-complete country names. This will require some refactoring in the way the data is stored on the backend.
  

Back to business

An unacceptable amount of time passed since I last posted, but I'm back. Lack of focus is what kills most projects, and I'm guilty of that. Luckily the site has been doing OK in my absence, but it's time to take it to the "next level". First, let's get an update on or KPI's:

Visits/week
358

Bounce rate/week
45.25%

PageRank
4

Linkbacks
53

Number of pages indexed
487

Delicious bookmarks
109

Yahoo Site Explorer Inlinks
6916

The big news is that we've been at PageRank 4 for a couple months now, and the number of indexed pages has gone up dramatically. Unfortunately the big bump in traffic that I was expecting with the high PageRank hasn't materialized. I blame the extremely high PageRank of my competition. I must refocus on building that PageRank number, and getting to within the the top 3 results for my major keywords. Here are the marketing TODO's that I must get back to:


There is also some development I want to do:


To get on the horse and knock a few things out, I've gone ahead and posted the site to Feedback Army. This service lets you submit your site for feedback (for a free), and even though I have enough feedback at this point, I'm hoping I can get some exposure and maybe some new ideas to spark some big ideas. It's only $10 for 10 reviews, so why not:


I'm going to change the KPI's moving forward, based on some new information:

• Adding "Sitemap indexed URLs" based on Google's Webmaster Tools, as this appears to be a much more accurate way to judge how much of my site Google can see.
• Adding "Links to site according to Webmaster Tools" as this again seems to tell you how many links Google see's, which is key.

A lesson learned is that there is indeed a period where Google keeps you at 0 PageRank, and about 5 months later they let you lose based on your real linkback measure. Unfortunately, that doesn't let loose huge amounts of traffic as I expected.