Back-to-School Month September Report

Back-to-School Month September Report This post reports about company activities in the month of September, the back-to-school month in 2013. While the back-to-school season started late and slow, the month of September 2013 ended strong. In fact, with an number of 746 tutoring jobs this September became almost as successful as the all-time record of October 2012 when we referred 769 students to tutors. Moreover, the unique visitor count crossed the 10,000 mark for the first time; 10,248 to be precise. In our analysis, the downward trend in web stats observed over the summer months was stopped primarily due to two events. First, the annual back-to-school season when students return to school looking extending their learning options through tutoring. Secondly, an unexpected Google search update: Hummingbird. This new algorithm ranks Tutorz search snippets higher for longer search queries, e.g. Chinese tutor new york city. Hummingbird is a milestone in Googles path away from the traditional keyword match algorithm towards a more semantical (meaning-based) match. In this context, our work with the Google webmaster tools most likely contributed to our back-to-school success. Supporting signal of our Hummingbird hypothesis is another a drop in the bounce rate from 52% in July to 47% in August to now a mere 42%. (When Google sends better matched visitors to TutorZ the bounce rate would drop.) Another signal in support of our Hummingbird hypothesis is the increase in pageviews per visit which is now at 5.38. Yet as always there are some downward stats: The Alexa traffic rank decreased from 200,000 to 277,000 for the US region. Worldwide, the traffic rank remains steady at 800,000. Furthermore, Craigslist and Backpage marketing tools continue to performing quite poor. Also, the TutorZ PR rank remains at a constant 3, no upgrade to 4 in sight. The marketing department achieved several big events this September. TutorZ was named a California Company of Excellence by the Small Business Institute in Washington, DC. Next, the principal authority on homeschooling awarded TutorZ the Top Homeschooling Curriculum award. Then there was Johns excellent article Another School Year Begins and Lillys stunning success of her post on How Japanese Children Multiply (718 likes and 20,000+ views).  Finally, we produced the 2nd video of our Chinese for Travelers series. On the technological front we can report an update to production server with the better performing Apache 2.4 and PHP 5.4. We have released improvements to our tutor profile pages which are a part of our long-awaited ratings review feature. Next, we now have 4 fully automated and well-designed emails directed at tutors (activation, welcome, profile completion and social media email). These email aim to improving the profile content, social media exposure and assessment of tutor quality. Furthermore, the old registration incomplete system was retired in favor for the new tutor approval system. Overall, TutorZ had a better than expected back-to-school season. Stay tuned for our ratings review feature in October together with even higher stats.