DiscoveringCebu is growing! Having had big success with Dean’s profile in September, this month we tried boosting the blog post about extending a Philippines tourist visa in Cebu using Facebook Ads. You can see that from the first third of the month, where active users are consistently above 30. We spent about $10 and got thousands of views, but not much engagement, and not much through-clicks. That was not worth it, but, well, we tried. 🙂
To understand SEO better, we started exploring ahrefs, digged into Google search console and Analytics. We learnt about what you, our readers, are really searching for. A funny search phrase we never thought about: “how many calories does balut have.” And by improving Mimi’s article on Balut in this way, we could help you find the info you need faster.
Other articles improved, too: Habal-habal did particularly well, rising from the dark pits of the 5th page in search results to the first page on Google PH. The Airport article did well, too.
Luggage and the SM Travellers Lounge, our unexpected traffic drivers, keep bringing in happy visitors steadily.
On the content-side, we did not produce as much as we wanted. Only four blog posts—that’s not enough! That’s in part because we put in time to finally write more reviews on coworking spaces. It was so necessary and frankly embarrassing, because we started DiscoveringCebu to promote Cebu (with its coworking spaces) for online and remote workers. Well, the other reason we didn’t make enough progress is that we were simply busy with other parts of life—DiscoveringCebu is a profit-free side-project after all. Still, this makes it hard to reach our yearly goal of 4k visitors per month. (Such a nice number! We’ll get there!)
Another thing we started to do is reach out to other pages to get links to our content. We also started linking more to other sites with good content. As we learnt about SEO and reflected on our goal, we realized we really need to promote every good piece of content about Cebu’s coworking space there is. That’s why we also started sharing such posts on Facebook.
One accomplishment this stands out, because we hope it will be SUPER USEFUL for remote workers: A map of all coworking spaces in Cebu! We’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. Finally, Rose found out how to do Google Custom Maps. Super!
All in all we learnt that content marketing takes time, but when you’re methodically playing the long game it can yield good results. That’s heart-warming (char!), because it means a side-project such as this has a chance—over many, many months. Go DiscoveringCebu!
For the next month, we plan to blog more again, and to further improve old articles. We’ll also have a review for every coworking space in Cebu. (Unless life gets in the way hehe.) Two content areas we want to explore are renting/real estate in Cebu and maps. Both seem to have decent search demands.
Here is the total number of monthly active users for October:
How do sessions and page views look like?
We started this month with less than 10 daily active users per day. The trend goes up, yey! Thank you!
Noteworthy:
- We published 4 blog post for this month.
- We posted 23 times on IG, and the two best performing post were Vegan treats at Juiceria Juice Bar from Kitskitchenn and the map of all coworking spaces in Cebu.
- Facebook page likes 161.
Plans for November: