PerfomicsAKM3: Doodle makes the planning process more comfortable
Doodle is about easy scheduling. It greatly simplifies the process of planning events, meetings, brunches – almost everything that needs to be planned. No matter what you want to plan, Doodle does it for free, it saves time and doesn’t require registration. Doodle is an internationally loved brand.
Doodle was founded as a start-up by two Swiss engineers from ETH Zurich in 2007. The Swiss media owner Tamedia bought a 49% stake in Doodle in 2011, then bought the rest in 2014, by which time it had 20 million users a month. The founders left the company, because it was no long a start-up, and Michael Brecht became the new CEO. Thanks to Michael and his team, nowadays Doodle is one of the most famous scheduling tools worldwide – probably the market leader, with 24 million users a month in 25 countries and 17 languages.
Doodle is a super viral product: it is in the top 1,300 sites worldwide, and gets about 80% if its traffic direct and from email. Every additional new user brings in several more. Doodle just needed some SEO from PerformicsAKM3.
Systematic keyword research showed that Doodle was not properly capturing either brand or generic traffic. SEO was done different for different countries and languages. In general, it is not necessary in this business to perform country-oriented marketing; language-oriented marketing is sufficient. But Doodle wanted to focus on specific markets for strategic reasons. Every client is unique!
Each case of international and multilingual SEO has its own “best practice” for long-term success. Sites can address different countries and languages with different country code top-level domains (ccTLDs, e.g. doodle.fr), subdomains (fr.doodle.com) or subfolders (doodle.com/fr). The choice depends on the time-frame and individual circumstances. Doodle chose to use subfolders, because many of the ccTLDs were already taken and would cost a lot to acquire, and it preferred to use subdomains for partners, such as exmpl.doodle.com. Subfolders already existed and were easy and quick to implement.
Written by Victoria Shayakhmetova, Media Group Head, ZenithOptimedia Russia