Here's what January at Himalayas looked like at a high-level:
- 🚦 Traffic: 18,325 users (up 37.2% MoM)
- 🌱 Organic traffic: 7,299 users (up 64.4% MoM)
- đź“ť Job applications started: 2,331 (down 5.8% MoM)
- đź’¸ Revenue: $340.22 (down 17.5% MoM)
If you're unaware, Himalayas is a three-person bootstrapped team (Jack, Jordan, and Abi) building a remote job board.
In January, we focused on speed improvements, content, and SEO.
Speed is a feature
We consider speed a core feature of Himalayas. Most people prefer sites with great design, but design goes beyond looks. It includes how it functions, and most importantly, how it feels. A big part of how things feel on the Internet depends on how fast they load.
Optimizing for quality of user experience is key to the long-term success of Himalayas. That's why we invest a good chunk of January into improving our Core Web Vitals.
Core Web Vitals are an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web by measuring:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page's main content has likely loaded.
- First Input Delay (FID) measures responsiveness and quantifies the experience users feel when trying to interact with the page.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability and quantifies the unexpected layout shift of visible page content.
LCP, FID, and CLS aim to measure core user experience needs: the loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability.
Google gives your page a good user experience if LCP <= 2.5s, FID <= 100ms, and CLS <=0.1. We started January with 7.7% and 65.3% of our URLs scoring a good page experience, and ended with 98.5% and 100% (numbers are mobile and desktop, respectively). We expect mobile to reach 100% soon.
These improvements have had a direct impact on organic traffic. Google began using page experience as part of its ranking systems in Mid-June 2021. However, it didn't play a full role in those systems until the end of August.
The update highlights pages offering a great user experience, and we've seen clicks from Google and impressions improve based on this work. Increased traffic is not only good for us but job seekers and employers too. More traffic means more job seekers attracting more employers who create more jobs which attracts more traffic, and the cycle repeats.
We're happy with where we landed at the end of January, but we know we still do more to improve the site's speed. So, we'll continue to treat speed as a top priority.
Our content flywheel is spinning
Our blog is starting to show signs of life in search engine result pages (SERPs).
The blog received 239k total impressions from Google and 4,788 organic visitors in January. Contrast these numbers to December's 115k total impression and 1,979 organic visitors, and you see a 107.8% and 141.9% increase, respectively.
For background, it takes anywhere from three to six months for articles to start bringing in organic traffic (depending on a site's authority). Meaning you can wait up to six months before you can tell if your strategy is working.
However, once you start ranking consistently, you can reach the first or second page in weeks or days if you're lucky. We started publishing consistently in October from a standing start and had nearly 10Xed the blog's monthly organic traffic at the end of January.
Now that we're getting traffic, it'll be easier to rank new articles and get the flywheel spinning even faster. It's just like Jim Collins writes in Good to Great:
Then, at some point—breakthrough! The momentum of the thing kicks in in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn ... whoosh! ... its own heavy weight working for you. You're pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.
In January, we published 33,880 words across 14 posts:
- How to Answer "Why Are You the Best Person for This Job?"
- December 2021 Monthly Update
- How to Answer "Tell Me About a Time You Made a Mistake"
- How to Answer: "What is Your Greatest Weakness?"
- How Many Hours Is Part Time?
- How to Tell Someone They Didn't Get the Job
- How to Answer "What Can You Bring to The Company?"
- How to Answer "Why Did You Leave Your Last Job?"
- How to Answer "Why Do You Deserve This Job?"
- How To Answer Brain Teaser Interview Questions
- How to Explain Gaps in Employment in Your Resume, Cover Letter, and Interview
- What To Do If You Can't Answer An Interview Question
- How to Create a STAR Method Resume
- How to Answer "Why Sales?"
We also refreshed old content. SEO content tends to follow five stages:
- A spike phase when the post is published
- A trough phase where growth stagnates
- A growth phase where pageviews increase for a few months
- A plateau phase where growth levels out
- A decay phase where traffic to the post drops
All content that grows via organic search hits a plateau then experiences decay. Decay means over time posts lose traffic. Decay usually starts slow, and new content replaces lost traffic. Refreshing content is as important as creating new content.
Not only is it far less expensive to refresh content, but it also breathes life into old pieces and can often increase traffic above the previous plateau phase.
In January, we refreshed four posts:
- 39 Remote Work Visas for Digital Nomads (Added information about Brazil's new digital nomad visa)
- 125 Fully Remote Companies Hiring (Added Oyster HR)
- Every Company with a 4-day Workweek (Added 18 new companies)
- How to Use the STAR Method to Ace Behavioral Job Interviews (Added section on STAR method resumes)
Find your next remote job or hire your next remote employee on Himalayas
Himalayas is the best place to find remote jobs and hire remote employees. We're focused on providing a job search, and hiring experience with great UX focused on speed and efficiency.
If you're a job seeker: Apply privately to 2,000+ remote jobs and discover 1,400+ remote companies. We make it easy to filter by time zone, visa restrictions, and roles so you can easily find remote companies that want to hire you based on where you live and your desired position.
If you're a remote company: Create a free company profile. Tell your story, build up your remote brand, and recruit the best. Share your culture, tech stack, and get seen by remote candidates looking to make a move. Then post a job and use our sophisticated job listings to specify time zone or visa requirements, and rest easy knowing that qualified candidates will see your job listings.
We'd also love for you to join our free remote work community.
