DoorDash reported 850 million dollars in revenue in 2019.
And in 2020, that number grew by over 300% with a reported revenue of 2.9 billion dollars.
Now, this crazy growth rate was mainly fueled by the pandemic.
People weren't going to restaurants and as a result, food delivery exploded.
Now, while DoorDash and their adversaries were all beneficiaries of this growth, DoorDash
continued to grow in 2021.
And they're rapidly gaining more market share in the food delivery space.
Now, I'd argue that one reason for their consistent growth is because of their strong presence
in organic search.
When people search for queries like "food near me" or "sushi near me," DoorDash is
there and their competitors aren't.
Just look at the organic traffic trend for DoorDash vs Ubereats.
Ubereats has pretty much always been ahead in organic traffic until DoorDash nearly doubled
search traffic in April 2020.
Now, traffic is just traffic.
The most interesting thing is the stark contrast in traffic value.
According to Ahrefs Site Explorer, Doordash.com has a traffic value of nearly 70 million dollars per
month or $2.52 per organic visit.
Whereas Ubereats' website has a traffic value of 12.6 million dollars per month.
Or $1.48 per organic visit, which is 41% lower.
So why the huge difference?
Simply put, DoorDash is ranking high for lucrative queries that millions of people search for every
month like "food near me" and various "[cuisine] near me" queries.
And these keyword rankings compound to millions of monthly organic visits with high
transactional intent.
As a result, quite a few of their pages have traffic values of well over a million dollars
per month.
And from these pages, their "restaurants near me" page is worth a whopping 41.6 million
dollars per month.
Compare that to Ubereats' top pages and you'll see that most of their traffic comes
to their homepage which is a result of a strong brand.
Nothing wrong with that.
But to put this in perspective, both of these companies will likely continue to get new
customers from word of mouth and other marketing mediums like social media.
But DoorDash will be attracting millions of new people to their site every single month
simply because they're in the search results when people want to buy food, so in my opinion,
they have an edge.
Now, business predictions aside, we need to talk about this $41 million dollar per month
page because you're probably wondering how they managed to pull this off.
So in this video, we're going to break down why this niche is so valuable, why this page
ranks so well, do a complete teardown of the page and give you some practical takeaways
to apply to your own site.
And I say we because I've invited my friend Patrick Stox from Ahrefs, one of the best
technical SEOs in the business to help us out.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up? Sam Oh here from Ahrefs and boy oh boy, we're really excited to dig into DoorDash's
41 million dollar page.
Now, this is kind of different from what we usually do so if you like this tear down,
then first, hit the like button.
And if you want to see us do more of these million dollar per month page tear downs then
let us know in the comments because otherwise, this will probably be the last one you see –
at least from us.
And hey, if you don't like the video then feel free to hit the dislike button but at
least have the courtesy to tell us why you disliked it so we can take that into
consideration and improve on future videos.
Alright, so Patrick, we've got a big challenge ahead of us today because I want to actually
earn these comments because this video was a ton of fun to prepare for.
You ready?
Let's do it!
Alright, so before we get started, it's important you understand what we mean when we call
DoorDash's "restaurants near me" page a 41 million dollar per month page.
So, the way we came to this number is by using a metric in Ahrefs called Traffic Value.
And Traffic Value represents the monetary value of a page's or website's Google organic
traffic if you were to pay for that same traffic with Google ads.
So it doesn't necessarily mean this page is making 41 million bucks per month, but
the fact of the matter is that traffic value is a decent proxy into understanding the commercial
value of a page.
So here's what the format of this video will look like.
First, we'll give you a high level view of the page and its SEO stats like organic traffic,
traffic value, and referring domains.
Second, Patrick and I will share our thoughts on why we think this page ranks well.
Third, we'll do a full breakdown of the page and dig deeper into the metrics to support
our hypotheses and we'll finish up with some key takeaways.
So let's get started with the high level overview of the page and its SEO stats.
DoorDash's "restaurants near me" page gets an estimated 9.1 million search visits with
a traffic value of 41.6 million dollars per month.
So that works out to roughly $4.57 per organic visit to the page.
And these are probably overestimations because of the nature of how Google ranks pages for
local queries and how keyword research tools estimate search volume, which is what our
traffic estimations are based on.
Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, then watch our video on how accurate
Google Keyword Planner is and it should all make sense.
Anyway, 4 dollars and change per visit is pretty high.
Sure it's not as high as some other industries like finance, insurance and law, but let's break
it down a bit.
Patrick?
Yeah, so for any of the "near me" queries, there's an intent to purchase something whether that's
have a contractor or something over or to go to a store and buy something.
Which means there’s a ton of businesses that are competing for your attention.
And Google ads, they work like an auction, so the more businesses that are competing
the higher the cost per click.
Yeah, I completely agree.
It's basically like supply and demand.
And you'll see a similar pattern for other websites ranking for these local queries
for in-person consumption.
Or basically those "service near me"-type queries.
For example, Drizly ranks for "liquor stores near me" and has a traffic value of 2.1 million
dollars per month.
And For the People ranks for queries like "car accident lawyer near me" along with
the fat-head keyword, "car accident lawyer" which gives their page a traffic value of 3.6 million dollars
per month.
Now, as for referring domains, which are unique websites that link to the page, there are around 190.
I didn't find anything special about this link profile, did you?
The links look mostly low quality - it's a bunch of coupon sites and scrapers.
I don't think that's having any kind of impact on the rankings of the page.
Well, I think that brings us nicely into the next part which is why this page ranks so well.
And there were three main things that we came up with.
The first is that they match intent better than the rest of the pages.
So if you look at the search results from pretty much any city in the United States,
you'll see Yelp, Tripadvisor, some locally relevant sites and DoorDash in the top 10 results.
Now, an interesting observation is that pretty much all of the search results are lists or
directories that show you reviews of different restaurants in the area — except DoorDash.
On top of that, the page itself probably looks irrelevant in the eyes of Google because when
they crawl the page, they're actually seeing a list of restaurants in Manhattan.
So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that it would rank well from an SEO standpoint
because the query is locationally dependent, but the restaurants aren't locationally relevant.
And we'll talk about this more.
Also, they are the only website that actually directly transacts with visitors.
So they've actually fractured intent in this SERP.
Yup, and the second thing we think that's helping here is the on-page factors.
Now, Sam mentioned the fractured intent
A lot of these "near me" queries, they're based on the specific user location.
And if you look at these top sites and their titles and their descriptions - they're specifically targeted towards that area.
What maybe happening with DoorDash is their content is talking about "near me."
So their titles, their URLs, everything says "near me."
And Google may be looking at this as more the specific "near me" literal intent.
But it could also be fractured in the ... what they provide - these delivery services - isn't really served
by any of the other top pages.
Basically, it's meeting the "delivery" intent.
And the third factor is PR cycling through internal links.
So in short, when a page gets quality backlinks, it builds up the authority of the page and as
a result, helps it to rank higher in Google.
Now, when you have these authoritative pages, other pages that you link out to with a followed
link, also get some benefit from that too.
So basically, DoorDash is using internal links intelligently to pass PageRank or link juice
or link equity or value or whatever you want to call it to this "restaurants near me" page.
And we won't get into this now because it's time for the page teardown.
So while the page looks simple at first glance, it's quite comprehensive in terms of serving
the searcher's intent.
If you put yourself in the driver's seat of a person searching for "restaurants near me,"
intent becomes clear as you think of the problem you're trying to solve.
First, you have to ask yourself, what do we know about the searcher and why are they
searching for this?
To me, I'd think that a) the searcher likely doesn't have a preference for a specific
type of food, otherwise they would have searched for "italian food near me."
And b) they want to go to a restaurant that's convenient to access.
And again, DoorDash is the only result in the top 10 that's actually offering food delivery.
Yes! So they have their main call to action, which integrates search into their landing page
and they serve the intent by giving you localized results to the nearest metropolitan area.
And I think this is an important part of how they're able to rank a catchall page for these
type of queries.
Remember, Google isn't seeing specific local content, they basically are seeing the content
for one particular city.
But users actually do see all the unique local content and find it very useful.
It's kinda like looking at the tool page - the content of the page doesn't really tell you much about it,
but other signals, specifically user signals, may give search engines a better idea if this is actually
of useful to people or not.
Yeah, so what Patrick's talking about are tools like our free Backlink Checker, it doesn't
have that much content on there but it gets an estimated 245,000 monthly search visits
from Google.
Or look at this Mortgage Calculator which pretty much has no content on the page
and it gets a ton of search traffic.
Yep!
So going back to the visitor's problem, the next thing to consider is how people will use your page.
And because we're talking about searchers looking for restaurants near them, I think
people choose restaurants by scanning key information.
So at least the way I do it is by looking for familiar restaurant names to see if
I feel like eating that.
Or if I'm traveling in a new area, I'll look at the star ratings, reviews, and price range.
Yeah, I think most people do that or something similar when doing this research.
The way that DoorDash has it laid out - it's very simple, very clean, it's done very well.
Now, once someone has decided on a restaurant they might want to order from, what do you
think they might want to do next, Patrick?
They want to know what to eat or what's good at these restaurants.
Yup! And they make this information accessible with a popular items dropdown and I'm guessing
they use their own internal orders data to populate this section.
So despite the fact that their page looks super- simple, they're actually serving intent perfectly.
Now, the last thing I want to say about intent is that I really like how they have their CTA
float with you as you scroll down the page.
And because they know that people are there to find a restaurant and not necessarily buy
something from them, they change the CTA text to "See who delivers to you" instead of something
like "Order Delivery" or "First Delivery is free."
Yeah, it shows they really understand who their visitors are and they're committed to giving them
a great user experience.
Love it.
Alright, Patrick, do you want to talk about the on-page factors because I think you had
some pretty interesting things to say.
Sure.
We know the content isn't locally relevant but Google's still ranking these pages, right?
There must be something there either in the user signals or possibly like we talked about the very
literal "near me" intent that is letting them rank.
The title, the H1, the anchor text of the page - there's a lot of signals that are saying that this
is actually relevant content for "near me."
And them maybe why they're actually ranking despite their own page content not really being relevant.
Yeah, that's really because you typically don't need to include these words on your
page in order to rank.
Alright, so if we keep scrolling down, you'll see an FAQ which is about DoorDash and I assume
this is more for conversion since I'm sure they hit a ton of people who are new to
the DoorDash brand.
And finally are a bunch of internal links to other generic near-me pages they created.
And this is the part we were talking about with PR cycling.
Basically, they've created a section in their footer to "[cuisine] near me" pages.
So when any of these pages earn links, PageRank is passed to other pages in the "near me cluster"
so they all benefit from links regardless of the page that gets it.
And if you look at the internal backlinks report to the "restaurants near me" page,
you'll see there are over 190,000 internal links to this page, including links from the homepage
which has a good number of referring domains.
Yeah, I think it's working pretty well because all of their "near me" pages are ranking really well.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Over 15 million monthly visits to these pages.
Bananas!
Alright, so Patrick, do you have anything else you want to add?
Just an interesting observation.
In my market they actually have a "city" page but it’s losing out to their “restaurants near me” page
which I was kind of surprised about.
I figured the near me page in this case would be more of a catch-all and if there’s more specific local content,
that's the one I would expect to win.
So, again I’m just kind of surprised that the catch-all page is the one winning.
Yeah, so I think directories typically create dedicated pages with the city name in their
titles and URLs or taxonomies, but Doordash is clearly having quite a bit of success with
the generic "near me" pages.
But like you said, they still have their city-specific pages.
The "near me" pages were actually built after the city pages.
I think that kind of confirms that their idea for these was more of as a catchall until they could
build out more specific location pages.
So it's like they have this catchall page but they're using their city pages as a hedge
against traffic loss.
Yeah. In my opinion, I think they could rank better if they had more of these directory-style pages,
that have more specific local content.
But the "near me" pages are interesting because on the long run they could be really hard to compete against.
They're gathering a bunch of links, and I think over time they just get stronger and stronger.
Sounds like you're bullish on DoorDash.
Let's wrap things up with some key takeaways.
I'll go first.
#1. Intent matching goes beyond writing "similar content" to the top ranking pages.
So as cliché as it sounds, you really need to get into the heads of your visitors and
go beyond getting the click.
Make your pages actually useful to searchers.
And for these important ones that have huge potential, take time to brainstorm with your team.
And that includes other marketing team members, designers, and possibly devs so you can create
the best possible result for your target query.
#2. Internal linking is important.
Especially when we get a site like this with a ton of content that's kind of structured.
Looking for opportunities to scale your internal linking can lead to some massive, massive wins.
Don't worry about things like overoptimizing your internal anchor text - that's not really a thing.
If it's relevant - you can use it and there's no such thing as an internal link penalty.
In addition, like Sam said, the intent, the relevance - the anchor text helps with all of that.
And last but not least, take calculated risks – but hedge.
Just as Patrick explained about what DoorDash has done, I doubt they knew that their catchall
"near me" pages would rank this well.
It was likely an educated guess because it's not similar to any of the top ranking pages
– remember, their page fractured the SERP, but it's obviously paying dividends.
But before they went out and did this, they already had existing pages for what they
knew would work.
So their bet was hedged.
Now, we'd love to hear your thoughts on DoorDash's restaurants page, and let us know in the comments
if you'd like to see more videos like this one.
And of course, if you enjoyed this video, then make sure to like, share, and subscribe
for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
I'll see you in the next one, and maybe Patrick or another SEO will be here with me.