The Coke site is one of the most successful websites of all time, with over 500 million views on a typical day. It’s no wonder why, with all the fun facts and engaging content. Sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly what is going on behind the scenes of such a monumental website. How did they grow to such an audience in the first place, and what is their secret to such longevity? Keep reading to find out!
Key Facts About The Coca-Cola Site
The site turns 10 this year, so it’s no wonder that they’re having an anniversary party. It was founded on April 15th, 1981, and the last update was on April 25th, 2021.
It was originally called ‘Hotel Coca-Cola’, but when they sold the naming rights to the hotel in Atlanta for a century, they got a new name for the site. Since then, the site’s been a huge success, with the most viewed page being the homepage, followed by the search bar (with it’s 500 million views), and then the homepage itself, which has 450 million views. There are over 100 million weekly active users according to Built With, and Alexa sees it as the 10th most visited site globally. Not bad for a website that’s been around for over 30 years!
The Structure Of The Coca-Cola Site
The homepage is one of the simplest and most effective structures ever created. There is a large, easy-to-scan, bulleted list of the latest headlines, as well as prominent links to the most popular articles and videos. The list of recent stories is kept relatively short (under 20 items) so that users don’t have to go through a ton of mediocre content to find the good stuff.
Each story has a prominent headline, which is followed by a few paragraphs of engaging text, a small bulleted list of the key facts, and then a few bolded sentences that summarize the story. The entire piece is not more than a few hundred words. For some reason, short, snappy writing still manages to evoke a visceral response in readers, even decades after the invention of the internet.
To the right of each story is a large preview of the image, which is accompanied by a small detail about the context of the image, and then a link back to the original source (unless it’s an AP image, in which case there’s no context nor source link).
There are prominent links at the top of the homepage to access various sections of the website, as well as a search bar above the fold, which leads to a Google search field (with the keywords ‘site:github.com quicktrip’ – because that’s what you’ll usually enter if you want to find information about their open-source projects, and they don’t use the ‘webmaster’ tool to prevent people from searching for these projects).
How Did The Coca-Cola Site Grow To Such Audiences?
The growth of the website has been nothing short of phenomenal. When you consider that they were one of the first ‘content farms’ (which are now considered illegitimate – SEO companies and individual bloggers can’t exist solely off of creating content for money), it’s no wonder that they’ve reached such large audiences. Back in the day, they’d simply buy search engine rankings for relevant keywords, and then just copy and paste articles from reputable news sources into their content.
What is a content farm?
A content farm is a website that primarily generates content for commercial or informational purposes, typically for money. BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and The Huffington Post are examples of websites that are considered content farms. They might seem legitimate at first, but if you look closer, you’ll see that all they are actually doing is buying search engine rankings for relevant keywords, and then just throwing together a bunch of plagiarized articles and videos that sound new but have actually been done before, by somebody else. (Check out our blog post for more info on this).
The key to a successful content farm is to have a steady stream of engaging content, preferably short-form articles, so that users scroll down the page and keep coming back for more. Make sure that the content is interesting and/or useful to your target audience, and that it is of high quality. Users should not be easily able to find the same content elsewhere on the web. When done right, content farms can work very well in terms of attracting and retaining users, and generating revenue – especially if you target a very specific niche, such as parenting or dog lovers, and then use keywords and SEO to draw in more organic, long-form articles that are very relevant to this audience. For example, if you’re a dog groomer, you could draw in potential clients from all over the world with content relating to dog grooming.
The ‘Old’ Way Of Generating Traffic
Although the method of getting traffic to a website has changed thanks to the internet and the various tools available to marketers, the method of getting the most out of this traffic hasn’t. Many websites, blogs, and social media accounts follow the same formula that worked in the pre-internet era…
…which is to say, build a brand for yourself, and then use this brand to attract website traffic, via organic searches on Google, and social media platforms like Twitter. If you can successfully do this, you’ll be able to generate significant organic traffic, and possibly even some paid traffic. (Learn more about this method in our guide on “how to build a brand for free”).
As you might imagine, this organic traffic can be highly valuable, as long as you know how to properly capitalize on it. If you’ve ever tried to sell hair-care products online, for example, you’ll know exactly what type of traffic you’re dealing with. The vast majority of these people didn’t come to your site because they wanted to learn about your product, they came because they were searching for information about hair care products, and found your site in the organic SERPs.
To get started, simply create a brand for yourself, and then use this brand to attract and retain customers. Once you have a steady stream of engaged customers, you can begin to develop additional marketing materials, such as product guides, FAQs, etc., and then use these guides to create more engaging content, and so on, until you have a fully-developed marketing strategy.
Why Did Coca-Cola Decide To Build A New Website?
The original website was built back in the day when there were fewer competitors, and the internet was much more obscure. Visiting a website that’s been around for over 30 years probably feels a bit like visiting an old friend’s house – as comforting as it is, a little strange, and a little bit of a pain when you want to know what’s going on.
When you consider what’s happened since then, particularly in the last year, it’s not hard to see why they decided to build a new website. Back in May of 2019, the original website saw a 29% drop in organic traffic, according to Google Analytics. This was a bit of a curveball, as their previous year had been incredibly successful – by October of that year, organic traffic was back up to pre-pandemic levels, and it currently sits at 80% of what it was previously. (You can learn more about the changes to their traffic in our guide to “How to track website traffic”).
This isn’t to say that the old website is useless. Far from it – being able to reach over 500 million unique visitors over the course of a year means that there is a lot of value in having a ‘legacy’ site, that your audience knows and trusts. You can do a lot to make the most of that, even if you decide to build a new website. For example, you could rebrand the old website as a ‘living archive’, which is exactly what it is – a place that people can go back to time and time again, to read an old article or check out a video that relates to something that they are interested in.
The point is, the original Coca-Cola Website was built back in the day, with a very specific audience in mind, which made it extremely effective at drawing in the ideal customer, and then keeping them coming back for more. Even now, three decades later, the site is still one of the most visited websites globally, and it’s easy to see why – it does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it very effectively.