Wheelchair Accessible Transport

clusk007

Hi All,

Early last year I posted about www.wheelchairtaxi.ie, a website I have developed to make it easier to find wheelchair accessible transport.

Well over the past couple of months I have been working hard on a brand-new, much more professional site which went live in October last year. You can search for all forms of wheelchair accessible transport in your area and I'm hoping it will go a long way to solving many of the problems associated with this type of transport.

I did an interview yesterday on 'Mooney Goes Wild' on Rte Radio 1 about Wheelchairtaxi.ie and where the idea came from. You can listen to it here (41 min in).. http://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10101143%3A82%3A14%2D01%2D2013%3A

Would love to get your feedback on the idea and the site.

Regards,
Stephen

fishbun

clusk007 wrote: »

Hi All,

Early last year I posted about www.wheelchairtaxi.ie, a website I have developed to make it easier to find wheelchair accessible transport.

Well over the past couple of months I have been working hard on a brand-new, much more professional site which went live in October last year. You can search for all forms of wheelchair accessible transport in your area and I'm hoping it will go a long way to solving many of the problems associated with this type of transport.

I did an interview yesterday on 'Mooney Goes Wild' on Rte Radio 1 about Wheelchairtaxi.ie and where the idea came from. You can listen to it here (41 min in).. http://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10101143%3A82%3A14%2D01%2D2013%3A

Would love to get your feedback on the idea and the site.

Regards,
Stephen

Sorry Stephen, I won't have time to listen to your interview but congratulations on getting exposure.

First I want to say well done on the site; it's quite polished and accessible (tee hee hee) and I can see a lot of work went into it. Some towns don't show under the correct county but the site is good enough - I wouldn't change it.

It is a rather niche site (Google Traffic Estimator has it about 1k/month local searches) but it is a noble one so I commend you for that. That said, there is some work to go in capturing those searches through SEO. I noticed straight away you have <30 inbound links, your <H> tags are not set properly and not enough attention is paid to keywords.

I recommend you read through the following:

Warrior Forum SEO FAQ
SEOmoz Beginners Guide
Point Blank SEO & also the "Best Of" on the same site

The first two will give you a general understanding of SEO and Point Blank has enough actionable starter tips to build momentum. I guess the main take away should be to incorporate a (high content) blog and build a ton of back links to target related search terms.

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out a good monetisation strategy for a site like this. Obviously if you have the taxis' phone numbers on site there won't be a decent way to track referrals, and advertising to a tiny audience probably won't even cover the costs of the hosting.

A directory site I admire that might be worth a look is Wedding Invite Love. Her business model forgoes the standard referral fee and instead builds (SEO optimised) profile pages for vendors that can be claimed for a premium. (see the FAQ - $270/year for higher placement in searches & more marketing promotion). Also her blog explains how she built the site in 6 weeks.

You'll obviously need to add more value to both taxis and users for this site to sustain itself. Perhaps you could connect with wheelchair organisations to help facilitate trips (meals, activites, holidays, airport runs etc) through your connections. I see no reason why this idea couldn't turn into a global travel agent for disabled travelers if you work hard on it, but as it stands I think it's a really good site to cut your teeth on and learn about blogging & SEO.

What are your future plans for it?

tricky D

fishbun wrote: »

your <H> tags are not set properly and not enough attention is paid to keywords.

The code under the bonnet is a mess semantically and has some puzzling practices eg. privacy policy content towards the top of the source code for all pages.

fishbun wrote: »

and build a ton of back links to target related search terms.

Quality over quantity applies these days. Getting unorganic, etc. backlinks will do more harm than good given recent Google changes.

clusk007

Many thanks for the replies guys, very much appreciate it.

I wasn't aware about the unstructured code so when I do have more finances in place this is something I will get fixed. I am not too concerned about the Seo at the moment because the site ranks first in Google when 'wheelchair taxi' and 'wheelchair transport' is searched. It is not that much of a competitive market in Ireland as yet which is to my advantage.

The site is very niche but I think that is also a huge advantage. I have a couple of ideas on how to make money from the site but one which I'm pursuing intensely at the moment is having an overall sponsor which will cover my costs.
This would be along the lines of 'wheelchairtaxi.ie' proudly supported by etc and I have a few companies who may be interested.

Thanks again for the feedback