Ridester

I used my self-taught SEO and digital marketing skills to scale Ridester.com from virtually no traffic at all in 2015 to over 1.5 million unique visitors/month at its peak in 2023.

Along the way, I designed strategic link building, outreach, and content campaigns that have organically earned hundreds of free links from domains like Business Insider, Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Recode, just to name a few.

This site has been a stable source of lead generation for Uber and Lyft for nearly a decade.

Back when I was first starting out in SEO, I played around with a lot of concepts to see what would stick. I was a newbie back then and didn't really have any idea what I was actually doing.

As I played around with various projects, I found a website marketplace called Flippa on which users could buy and sell existing websites.

One day, I saw a website called Ridester listed in the Classifieds section. It was one of the first rideshare platforms that were introduced at the height of Uber and Lyft's rise from obscurity.

Despite its best efforts, the platform wasn't able to secure the funding or talent to scale in a meaningful way to compete with the other well-funded giants, so it collapsed.

At the time, I had recently signed up as a rideshare driver. This was at a time when ridesharing was a foreign concept to most people, which meant that there wasn't a lot of information or support for drivers.

The more I dug, the more I realized the SEO potential of the domain. It had powerful links from news outlets like Techcrunch, so I had an idea - to build an informational resource for drivers on top of the domain's existing power.

Ridester wasn't making money at the time, so it didn't seem to have much interest among buyers.

I ended up acquiring it, including the domain Ridester.com, using some savings that I had set aside to specifically allocate to businesses in the future.

Once I had the domain, I spent the next few months learning how to design and build a content site. It wasn't very professional like it is now, but it was something to build on.

For the next 6 months, I'd consistently publish helpful, insightful, informative content to the site about what I learned while I was behind the wheel. Eventually I had an entire library of exclusive content that wasn't really available anywhere else at the time.

As I continued to work on the site, the results continued to compound.

By early 2018, the site had become a well-known resource in the ridesharing niche, receiving a steady amount of traffic.

By that time, I had already started diversifying my income streams after seeing the power of SEO as the site got more traffic and made more money.

However, I took my eye off the ball did not focus much of my time on this site because of the fact that it was doing so well.

I also did not anticipate the sheer amount of competitors that would end up copying my strategy, model, target keywords, and even sometimes the content itself.

This was something I should have paid more attention to. By the end of 2019, the traffic was decreasing and I knew I had to do something about it.

I ended up deciding that more links would help push me back up in the rankings, so I built a custom link-building strategy that was targeted at acquiring powerful links from high-authority domains.

At the time, Uber was claiming that drivers could earn a certain amount of money per hour as a driver. I had access to thousands of drivers as a results of running my site, so I put those claims to the test.

My team build a survey that eventually polled 2,500 drivers about how much they were actually earning and how happy they were with the rideshare platforms.

Once we collected and crunched the data, we created visuals to simplify our findings and wrote a long-form blog post explaining what we found.

From there, we developed unique angles from our findings to pitch to the media. The one that stuck was pitting our findings against Uber's income claims.

A reporter from Recode (which has recently integrated with Vox) ended up running our story. The story hit the front page of Recode and ended up going viral.

Ridester ended up getting quoted in some of the biggest news publications on the internet, including CNBC, Mashable, Techcrunch, The New York Tmes, and many others.

As a result of the links, Ridester's traffic exploded. Once the story went viral, rankings skyrocketed which led to the site experiencing an all-time record of 1.5 million unique visitors per month in early 2019.

Once more, I shifted my focus to my other projects as the competition continued to increase and Ridester's traffic continued to drop.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, which caused traffic to essentially go to zero temporarily as a result of people not driving for or using ridesharing services.

Seeing the meteoric rise of food delivery platforms during that time, I had the idea to expand Ridester from solely rideshare-related information to also include delivery-related information.

My intuition was again correct, as the site consistently grew and hit nearly record highs every month from that point forward.

That was, until Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update which caused the site to crash in a dramatic fashion, similar to the crash it experienced in 2020.

But the thing is, I'm not worried about getting hit. Every time the site has dropped, I have learned valuable lessons that have helped me improve the site. These improvements have lead to increases in traffic with time.

I dove head-first into the issue and essentially rebuilt the site from scratch. I redesigned the entire site to be more user-friendly, and then deleted all of the unhelpful, low-quality posts that made it onto the site with time.

From there, I re-wrote nearly every post on the site that was left, making each one more helpful than competing articles on the internet.

While the industry hasn't seen any notable HCU recoveries so far, I am confident that Ridester will come back. I've spent a lot of time and effort rebuilding from scratch, and am hopeful that Google will reward that work.

At a minimum, this experience has taught me about the importance of building only the most high-quality, helpful resources possible - lessons that I now apply to every project I am apart of.