Bus ticket sales service in Ukraine and Europe

A customer approached us, at the 2 index . ninja service, with a large number of his projects. We launched them almost simultaneously, depending on the degree of readiness, and received very interesting results.

With the permission of the customer, who was very impressed by these results, we are starting to publish some of them.

Bus ticket sales service in Ukraine and Europe

Bus ticket sales are a fairly common type of online service. Such sites allow you to quickly and conveniently buy tickets for almost any bus route, coordinate the schedule with the train and plane, and view the conditions for passengers   vehicle, etc.

Such sites operate on a commission from sales, which is quite insignificant - therefore, to receive any decent income, you need, at a minimum, a very large number of visits to the site.

How to get high traffic if the project is just starting? A quick solution is advertising. But with a small margin and significant competition (and therefore a high click price)   It is quite difficult to maintain profitability.

Achieving brand recognition for your website is also quite difficult (by and large, all bus ticket sales services have very similar names), time-consuming and expensive   – you need to reach millions of potential users, and more than once, so that they at least somehow remember the fact of your existence and at the right moment to order tickets, type in your website address.

The solution is obvious: organic search

Organic search in search engines Google , Yandex , Bing will give your site massive, and most importantly – free traffic, but there are nuances. Let's consider the situation with the sale of bus tickets using the wonderful SWOT analysis tool.

So:

* strong point ( strong ): as already mentioned above, it is a massive and free attendance.

* opportunity : a virtually infinite expansion of the number of queries for which your site will be shown in search engine results.

* threats ( threat ): also mentioned above is the huge competition in this market.

* and finally, the weak side: we will consider it in detail.

Any search engine is a rather inert thing, which, moreover, is “suspicious” of new sites (less than 1 year old: why index you, to put it simply, if you are not a fact that you will renew your domain registration and exist for a second year).

That's why

The main problem for a new website is indexing pages in search engines

A typical bus ticket sales website, and our client's website is no exception, consists of thousands and thousands of pages. Simply put: one for each route between cities.

Why "thousands and thousands"? Let's count. 25 regional cities alone give more than 600 routes between themselves. If you take all the cities, it's already 214 thousand. Plus different dates, plus indirect routes with transfers, etc. - it's easy to reach a million and more.

An inertial search engine will index a million pages for a very long time. If you do not take some actions.

Quick and easy start, sales in the first week

Our customer didn't want to wait too long and service 2 index . ninja helped him with this.

In the first week of cooperation (the site itself was not even a month old) we jointly achieved indexing of more than 2000 pages, which already provided the basis for explosive growth in traffic, and, as a result, conversion of traffic into first sales. It was still a long way to any significant income and, especially, payback of investments in the site, but the beginning was very encouraging.

That is, in the first month, the traffic was about 20 people per day, mainly from organic search. As is known from the empirical rule, 10 visitors give 1 sale - and so it turned out: we observed 1-2 sales per day immediately from the moment of the beginning of cooperation.

What was done to quickly index pages

Since it was necessary to index almost a million pages, then from the possible tariffs (in 2 index . ninja they are called "plan") we offered the customer to choose the most powerful one - BlackNinja for $850 and a price of $0.0017 for indexing a link (a page with a unique address).

It would seem that the investment is quite high, especially considering the small size of the commission for selling a ticket – but let’s look at it in perspective: if about 2 thousand pages were indexed in the first week, and this immediately affected traffic (and, consequently, sales) – then such costs are compensated very quickly.

Conclusions

For projects with low margins but mass traffic, organic search is probably the best tool for attracting traffic. However, the "natural way" does not provide a quick start due to the inertia of search engines in terms of indexing site pages.

Therefore, the tool 2 index . ninja It seems to us in this case to be one of the effective, fast and inexpensive solutions to the problem.