The subject of the talk was about ticketgoose.com, product, customer service, SEO and Technology. The seminar was conducted on 12th September 2014 by MBA students of Kumaraguru Engineering college, Coimbatore.
It all began in the summer of 2007 when I flew to India and through his personal experience, I found that there were bus operators aplenty, but actually buying a ticket proved to be a wild goose chase! Even from a bus operator’s point of view, tracking real-time inventory was crucial. At that time, a bus operator uses to allocate a certain number of seats to an agent, who, in turn, received approx 10 % commission per ticket. This gave me the idea and me along with my three friends launched Ticketgoose as an Online bus ticket booking platform in 2007.
The startup had initially signed up as a ticketing agent with ten bus operators but they soon realised that online bus ticketing as a dream would crash if there was no way to track real-time inventory. “We found it very difficult to run our business because the other agents wanted to hold on to the bus seats as long as they could. A year into operations, the founders developed software called Vahana, which helped bus operators check real-time inventory online. Once Vahana was on the Cloud, bus operators no longer needed to invest Rs 20-25 lakh on expensive software to check their inventory. They could do it online on a per-transaction basis and in real-time too! How awesome is that?
In simple words, if an operator wanted to access the data of 10 buses every day, he now needs to pay only Rs 1,000 per month per bus. Additional facilities like customised skins for each operator on the platform lured even more operators to the portal. Ticketgoose also functions as a bus ticket aggregator, allowing ticketing agents to use the portal to purchase pre-paid tickets. With commission structure and a deposit of just Rs 10,000, even other popular sites such as Makemytrip.com and Via.com are availing its services.
While 50 per cent of the startup’s revenues come from direct booking, the remaining 50 per cent comes from B2B services. Today, the portal has over 60 operators on its platform and access to 300 other operators on other platforms. It has a network of over 5000 agents and reaches another 20,000 agents through other networks via consumers of their aggregation service.
At the highest level, search engine optimization can be broken down into off-page and on-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of factors that a website owner can directly manipulate on their site. Off-page search engine optimization refers to the digital signals outside of one’s own website that marketers can influence indirectly.
There are notable differences between on-page and off-page optimization in SEO which we will go over in the following sections. On a strategic level, off-page SEO is the more difficult and tedious of the two, so we’ll cover that first.