Small Summary
Visa Franchise is a company that provides migration services for entrepreneurs looking to invest in the United States.
Its affiliated company, VettedBiz, is a platform that offers comprehensive information and analysis on franchises and businesses in the U.S.
Although I performed some small tasks for Visa Franchise, my work was primarily focused on VettedBiz. Unlike Visa Franchise, which emphasizes personal, human-centered services, VettedBiz is more of a tech-driven company that provides solutions based on data and informatics.
With access to a vast amount of data, we were able to develop a variety of tools and resources aimed at delivering information to potential clients in an efficient and user-friendly way.
Further on, as an administrative initiative, it was decided to develop a platform that would streamline the data input process—up until then, a highly manual and tedious task—and consolidate several features scattered across different areas of the company. These features included, for example, dev tools and tools for measuring SEO metrics for both websites.
I gave this platform the codename “PV2” (a name I believe only I used during my time there).
VettedBiz
When I started working at VettedBiz, I don’t think I had ever encountered a project where the multi-epoch geological evidence was so evident.
I’m not entirely familiar with the project’s full history, but I do know that many people worked on it before me, each trying to impose their own vision. This left behind layers of work that made it, quite possibly, the most challenging project I’ve ever onboarded onto.
Over time, the situation improved significantly, and the speed at which we delivered new features became unprecedented. In the future, I’d like to write a blog post highlighting some of my favorite features, like the Global Search and the Query Builder Quiz.
I took away invaluable lessons from this experience, especially about how to fix something so broken*—while being unable to discard it entirely for reasons I won’t elaborate on*. Starting fresh with a new app felt like the obvious, ideal solution. However, accepting the reality of the current situation and learning how to move forward within those constraints comes with a special sense of satisfaction. It’s rewarding to see how, little by little, everything begins to come together and take shape.
SEO (From Zero To … Hero?)
Our app looks better than ever with a fresh new look and exciting new features, but Google Analytics and AHREFS seem to have something to tell us.
Traffic has been on a freefall for quite some time now—it’s down almost 90% from its peak. I’ve been keeping an eye on this for a while, discussing it with coworkers, until we decided to make it a top priority to address.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)… I must admit, I had never heard much about SEO until this job —just the occasional article I’d skim over.
But it’s a whole universe in itself, full of open secrets and GURUS who, I can confirm, truly know how to make the most of Google’s search engine.
As for our website, it was in terrible shape. One of the key metrics I relied on was AHREFS’ (a great product) Health Score , which when we started working on it, was below 50 points —pretty dreadful-. By the time we were done, it had climbed up to 97🌟.
It’s hard to list all the issues I encountered and had to solve in order to detoxify the site and gradually regain Google’s trust to climb back up in its rankings.
SEO poisoning, Chinese betting ads (and other shady stuff) in the RSS feed,
10 times more non-indexed pages than indexed ones, and we didn’t
even have sitemaps to present ourselves to Google.
In addition to all this technical cleanup, I must say we were lucky to hire someone who knew how to structure our content to be more search engine friendly. And after a lot of hard work restructuring everything, we saw great results.