ISOFTDATA

Overview

ISoftData is a company based out of Lincoln, Nebraska that offers inventory management solutions as well as has a subsidiary, which offers quality assurance software for companies in food and beverage. After meeting the president of ISoftData, I informed him of some of my personal research using a tool called Google Search Console. And based on my sheer enthusiasm I was hired on as a consultant. During our first 15 minutes with his engineering team, I uncovered that there were over 550000 pages on their website that were not being indexed for a variety of reasons.

This led to multiple opportunities for which I was eventually brought on to assist in consulting full-time. The first opportunity was to address an issue that only a handful of companies in the state of Nebraska had, and that was the fact that they had over 2.2 million products available on their website. This becomes an issue with Google as they carefully appropriate resources to only display a certain number of pages from every website. With millions of pages available we needed to identify how one webpage could serve the purpose of multiple, which led to the design of category pages as well as location-based searches using the same framework of a Yelp-style webpage in which we could display our vendors. And we could create webpages for the highest traffic cities in the country, which were using our website to buy truck parts.

After creating our vendor locator feature, I moved on to work on a weekly email. A weekly email was used by our direct competitor with a broken down site map of all parts which had been added in the last seven days. The engineering team was hesitant to apply any resources towards this. And seeing the value of such a feature, I took it upon myself to bring on two additional consultants to generate an email in PHP and HTML that would query our sequel database and populate a similar format of email. Overall, I was only able to lift search impression share by six and a half percent during my tenure at ISoftData.

However, with more than a billion impressions per year, this small lift had a significant and lasting impact as well as my other informal role at ISoftData, which was creating a space for some senior engineers to gain a confidence to take on responsibilities as leaders within the company. This started out as a rocky process of asking them to start running meetings. Yet within a few weeks they were approaching me to thank me, and were soon able to pass off parts of their workload to junior staff to better attend to the overall direction of the product lines, features and timelines that had been sitting in our backlog for several decades. 

https://datastudio.google.com/open/10zW4cGOnurhJPc6uKKQCoQwR9xA_qxsX