Our marketplace sites are hotting-up for Autumn

The Marketplaces division of Friday Media Group is awash with exciting projects that are set to propel our products forward through 2019 and into 2020.

The marketplaces are focused on Bringing buyers and Sellers together across various marketplaces, including Friday-Ad, Wightbay, BoatsandOutboards, Gunstar, Horsemart, Horseclicks, Caravansforsale, amongst others! With Friday-Ad, we are working on an exciting new App which will transform the way our users can buy and sell, making it much quicker and easier to sell and safer to buy. Development is well underway, and we are looking forward to seeing this evolve in the coming months. These improvements will also be transferred over to the mobile and desktop versions of Friday-Ad. With our Niche marketplaces, we are also undergoing a transformation of the product over the coming months. We are working on a project to rebuild the platform these sites operate on, making them faster, more user friendly and adding multiple features and functionality to improve the users journey. Central to the project is making the sites more of a community, so branching out from just buying and selling to bring the users news, advice, courses, events and much more. Watch this space as we release new features every month!

Our sites are growing..

We are seeing some nice growth in traffic and response on a number of our marketplace websites as our marketing and SEO focus is paying off. Here’s the top performers this month.

Horseclicks – We’ve had a technical SEO and marketing focus on Horseclicks over the past quarter and we have started to see some huge positive impacts:

• Organic search traffic is now up 23,000 users YoY per month in June (40,000 sessions!)
• Entrances to horse search results pages are up 18,000 users per month (+25% YoY) (driven by breed pages – which I believe there was some work done on in particular)
• Entrances to trailers search results pages are up 5,000 users per month (+20% YoY)
• Buyer messages to sellers are up 22.4% YoY

Horsemart – is smashing it in terms of website traffic and engagement.

• Buyer messages to sellers are up 48.1% YoY in June
• Website traffic is up 48% YoY (an extra 140,000 users per month) – driven by organic search entrances to blogs and search results pages
• A focus on social is pulling in 25,000 users per month

Most of this comes from having partnerships with brand ambassadors and producing authoritative and engaging content within this niche industry.

Friday-Ad – Our original brand Friday-Ad is performing strongly YOY, with the number of users up 10% year on year. This is mainly down to various technical and on-page improvements that have been made over the past months, layout improvements to search results pages (for better usability and UX), the introduction of new filters (allowing us to rank for more relevant and competitive keywords) and a big clean up of the Friday-Ad backlink profile (where we found lots of spammy links). We’re also getting some good traction on our blogs, which are ranking for some competitive terms.