I’ve seen RevaHealth few weeks ago after getting Loopthing pushed on their blog (I think Caelen King wrote that quick review). They are now featured on the pages of TuesdayPush project initiated by Gordon Murray which is a common effort of promoting Irish based technology related companies.
I like this idea of pushing things, not only because Loopthing had a benefit from it, but indeed it brings traffic to sites that need it, in a coordinated way. I can see other advantages that I’m not going to share here at the moment because this is a post about RevaHealth and I think it’s worthy for a push.
Traffic & Money
As I said, I’ve seen the site few times before and as I was telling Joseph, the owner seems to be into promoting the site through search engines very much, or probably hired someone who’s doing it based on close observation.
While I think this all these efforts are good and you can see all over the site (the way links are constructed, titles are very good, and articles are targeting keywords which are giving internal pages more weight), the domain name kind of puts down all those efforts and probably Caelen knows it better than me (just by studying his competition’s rankings).
On the other hand, RevaHealth is a good choice for a brand: once it sticks into the user’s brain, it remains there, and he probably may notice that on the fairly nice amount of returning visitors.
The business model is not bad at all, and I think medical companies are willing to pay for the exposure they provide. Good for having the advanced statistics page which allow you to easily measure the success of your campaigns and decide if you want to keep going with the advertising or not.
I’m not sure how far this site goes, and and as I know about this niche sites, they don’t usually go far unless you have a good strategy and get promoted in the heart of the niche until you’re established as an authority. I’m sure there’s a plan for that.
The landing page’s footer looks a bit spammy with the “Dentist Turkey“, “Dentist Hungary”, “Dentist etc” written there. I’ve seen so many sites doing it and always had a feeling that they’ve hired the wrong SEO company – it can be done in so many different (and better) ways.
Basically I believe things can look a lot better with a bit of work while the page will not only cater for search engines but visitors will like that as well. I think some Kaizen tracking will solve the problem or a crazy egg vizualization to see what the humble visitor is really up to when getting there. That’s because I never liked the complicated landing pages.
I think RevaHealth is a good example of how a niche can be explored and monetised corectly, by hitting the demand with the right product. I just don’t understand why Adsense ads are there, while I can think of better solutions that can be implemented strictly for the niche. If earnings there aren’t paying much I’d take them off and promote the”on-site advertising options, track this ad’s converion rate and decide within 3 months if it paid off or the old “cents paying” G ads must come back.
Techie stuff
I remember the login part was a bit unstable, I had to login now and then to access the same feature few minutes later after I’ve left the specific area of the site where I initially logged in for; but that’s nothing biggie.
Technology used seems to be ASP, running on an IIS-6 server, but I would hide all this info for security purposes. It’s better to keep things hidden to deter bad guys. A good thing is that content is served gzip compressed which saves my bandwidth and make me feel that I’m saving the planet. I think more sites out there should serve content in deflate mode and minified, it saves money on both sides.
Technically, I think the site scales very well and search is fast. Being the main thing on the site, search supposed to be that way otherwise I’d post a negative review. The fact that the main functionality is served correctly insures the sites success for the new visitor.
The good thing about the search page is that users won’t notice the quick delay which takes to render the search results because of the slick activity indicator shown after submitting the search query. This shows good usability practices and care about details. This is good thing, and I’ve noticed few small ones as well, like the CSS sprites used for speeding up the site’s pages rendering. All these make this site fast, and friendly.
In conclusion
I’m sure there’s lots of things to say about the site if look deeper into it, but I consider RevaHealth as a healthy project and I wish their team best luck in their endeavours as they have a pretty solid product which deserves a push.
Regarding economics, I’m sure there’s lots of feedback from the users’ behaviour, and the ownes are up to split testing anyway based on my latest sources’ news (blame twitter). It’s all about testing and continuously figuring out what’s there that needs to be served. I like the colors and the layout btw.
