Sourcing goals and metrics scorecard
To maintain accountability, guide design decisions, and measure the performance of our content and code improvements, we evaluate and track all changes against four core goals.
🎯 Core goals
1. Provide value to users looking for local goods
Help users easily find, filter, and verify high-quality products made in the United States and specifically within their state or city.
- Search query volume and success rates.
- Location-based directory page engagement.
- Time spent on brand details and story profiles.
2. Drive affiliate link click-throughs
Sustain our research operations by directing qualified buyers to shops, brands, and products via clear, beautiful, and trusted callouts.
- Outbound click-through rate (CTR) on affiliate links.
- Conversion rates on outbound referrals.
- Revenue generated from affiliate network conversions.
3. Attract new users and organic traffic
Grow our audience by ranking for high-intent local manufacturing searches and sharing relevant social media assets.
- Organic search engine impressions and clicks.
- Direct traffic coming from social channels (such as Instagram link-in-bio).
- Unique monthly active visitors.
4. Grow domain authority
Build long-term authority as the premier, trusted index for verified American-made goods across search and social channels.
- Total number of authoritative external backlinks.
- Domain authority (DA) rating.
- Social media audience growth (Instagram handle `@domesticindex`).
📊 Scorecard evaluation
Before approving or deploying any new feature, content update, or schema modification, evaluate it using this scorecard (rate each from 0 to 5, where 0 is no impact and 5 is maximum positive impact):
| Goal | Evaluation question | Score (0-5) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. User value | Does this update make it easier for a user to find, filter, or trust local goods? | — |
| 2. Affiliate revenue | Does this update make affiliate links clearer or more compelling without losing trust? | — |
| 3. Traffic acquisition | Does this update target high-intent keywords or create shareable content? | — |
| 4. Domain authority | Does this update create clean, crawlable, and authoritative resources for search bots? | — |
Minimum threshold: An update should score at least a 3 in at least one category, and have no negative impacts on other categories, to be approved for implementation.