This is an Analysis of SunBasket.com in way of popularity and traffic.

1. Gavin Ragland
Sun Basket Popularity & Traffic Analysis
WEBSITE OVERVIEW
General Industry & Company Information
In a modern world, a new form of commerce has come forward. This massive industry
has taken the world by storm, and is now one of the most common ways to purchase services and
items: online. Whether it be clothes, razors, driving services, electronics, and anything else that
comes to mind, there is a good chance that using a service like Amazon, you can order anything
you may need. This extends even to our base need of food. The meal kit industry is on the rise
and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
A meal kit is a novel concept, where a meal is ordered and you are delivered the
ingredients in proportioned amounts to your home so that you can follow the recipe and cook the
meal. This is generally done on a subscription basis, but can also be done with individual meals.
Sun Basket is one of these meal kit websites, but with an interesting twist. Not only do they
source from reputable sources and only use organic and non-GMO ingredients, they have meal
plan offers for people who eat organic, gluten-free, paleo, and vegetarian as well.
Price points for the service sit at $11.99 per serving, with recipes sitting at 2 or 4 servings
per meal, if you are ordering from the full menu, and $10.99 per serving if it from the family
menu. On the regular menu, it sends 3 meals a week, while the family menu can choose to have
2, 3, or 4 recipes a week. The amount of recipes offered each week is 18 ranging from organic to
paleo to vegetarian.

2. Looking into how trustworthy the site is, three particular things jump out. First and
foremost, a badge of honor that the company proudly wears on its site, they do have a USDA
Organic Certified seal above the fold on the front page. After seeing this, I did a search through
the USDA’s Organic Integrity Database (https://organic.ams.usda.gov/integrity/) and found that
this seal is legitimately earned. Secondly, looking into the staff at Sun Basket, the most
prominent figures are their CEO Adam Zbar and Chef Justine Kelly. Before founding this
company, Zbar was a founder of the social media company Zannel, a still existing social media
website, and Chef Kelly is the former chef de cuisine (also known as the main or executive chef)
of the Award Winning Slanted Door restaurant. Finally, looking at the 54 news articles that the
site provides, we can see several prominent sites who have left decent reviews over the service,
including Wall Street Journal, Cheddar, Tech Crunch, and Vogue. Between the great deal of
good press from reputable sites, the solid pasts of the people in charge of the website, and the
impressive work getting the USDA Organic Certification leads me to believe this site is an
authority on the subject of meal kits.
Quality Content Assessment
A website’s content must have quality, as a more quality website will not only attract
more people. There are many facets to show this quality on your website and all should be taken
into account. The first focal point is grammar and spelling errors, also called typos. Using the
website SEOchat and its free spell checker (http://tools.seochat.com/tools/free-spell-checker/), I
was able to quickly crawl through all pages associated with the site. Looking at the top 15 pages
with possible typos, we see an average of 14 possible errors, with a maximum of 24 and a
minimum of 7. However, after looking through these errors, it was found that the error were
found in three categories: food based words that were not in SEOchat’s dictionary but were

3. actually spelled correctly, strings of letters that were actually used to insert certain characters like
percentage signs, and lack of spaces that were only visible in the code but looked correct on the
page. This leads me to believe that most, if not all, errors on this site are actually mistakes from
the SEOchat check.
Now we can look at unique content. Unique content, in the terms of this analysis, is
specifically content that doesn’t exist anywhere else. To find if there is any material that has
been copied to or from other sites, I used the tool Siteliner to see if any duplicate material was
found. Siteliner found 153 results for duplicate content, making up around 17% of the websites
content. After looking through the results however, it was found that all content detected was
either duplicated on their own site or were duplications of and from review and news sites.
Competing Site
With the meal kit industry being such a booming phenomenon, it is no wonder that there
are so many competitors to Sun Basket. In this paper, we will be using one of the most popular
meal kit websites as a benchmark, Home Chef. The first and most stark difference between the
two companies is the demographic each site seems to target. With Sun Basket, meals cost 10.99
to 11.99 per serving and focuses heavily on their options for organic, vegetarian, paleo, and other
restrictive dietary needs and preferences. Home Chef instead costs anywhere from 7.99 to 9.95
per meal, and focuses more on the ease of cooking as opposed to dietary restrictions, and even
has an option for “Quick Lunch”, being meals that can made and eaten quicker. These price
points show that Sun Basket most likely targets already established adults with very particular
diets that want to experience the cooking in their leisure, while Home Chef tends towards a little
less extravagant audience, people on the go with less time on their hands, and even people who
are trying to learn how to cook as opposed to those who do it for entertainment.

4. POPULARITY ANALYSIS
Total Backlinks
No. of Referring
Domains
Avg No. of Backlinks
per Domain
SunBasket.com 24.8K 916 27
HomeChef.com 31.3K 894 35
In the above table, we have used the site SEMrush
(https://www.semrush.com/dashboard/) to find the number of backlinks and the number of
referring domains for both SunBasket.com and HomeChef.com. A backlink is a link from an
external site that leads back to the site in questions, and a referring domain is the domain that
puts out that link. Knowing these numbers, as well as the average, is very important as a high
average number of backlinks could mean one site sharing our site extremely often, and when
search engine algorithms look for which site to show first, if all those links are to a site of lesser
quality, it can damage the company’s chance of being seen at all. Looking at the two sites’
backlinks, we can see that HomeChef.com has more backlinks then SunBasket.com, but also has
a large average number of backlinks per domain. However, the average here is generally
negligible. While HomeChef.com has a higher average, it isn’t enough of a difference to make
out whether one is actually doing better or worse than the other. To get a better feel, we are
going to also look at which domains are linking to each site.
RadioMD.com (374 links): This is a website that has several podcasts and articles that relate to
general health. Looking in a little farther, I found one of the main speakers to be Dr. David L
Hill, MD. I was quickly able to find that he is not only a doctor but a chair of the AAP
(American Academy of Pediatrics) Council on Communications and Media. Having a member of
a national health organization on the site increases the credibility of RadioMD.com, which
counts as quality links for SunBasket.com.

5. PodKnife.com (413 links): PodKnife.com is a website that hosts audio podcasts for a number of
different podcasts including the likes of Ellen DeGeneres. However, this leads me to believe that
the links from this site are actually part or the descriptions of different podcasts, whether Sun
Basket actually sponsors them, or even if they just like the service. This means I can’t actually
pin down any uses of Sun Basket’s domain, so I am unable to say whether this counts as quality
links.
fAnneTasticFoods.com (475 links): fAnneTasticFoods.com is a fitness, health, and better
eating blog ran by Anne Muaney. On the site, the links are good reviews of Sun Basket from
Anne, who claims to be a Registered Dietitian. This is confirmed by the Huffington Post who she
also often writes for. Between the size of her blog, the good reviews, and her qualifications, this
is a quality link source
DoctorOfCredit.com (1,014 links): DoctorOfCredit.com is a site that is generally confusing to
understand. It calls itself a site dedicated to helping people do better when it comes to
understanding credit scores and credit in general, however the main page is covered in coupon
and limited time deals making it seem extremely illegitimate. To add to this, it would seem that
the 1,014 links we not even through the deals and articles provided, but instead where in the
comments section where people would link their refer link to SunBasket.com. Due to this
revelation as well as the general feel of illegitimacy on this site, I find these links to be of poor
quality.
PaleoGrubs.com (13,200 links): PaleoGrubs.com is the site that backlinks to SunBasket.com
the most, and after looking at the page for a couple moments, it is no wonder why.
PaleoGrubs.com is a site that hosts many paleo recipes. This is a core demographic to Sun
Basket, and they seem to be taking advantage of it. At first glance, there is no mention of Sun

6. Basket in any articles or recipes on any pages I looked through, until I noticed that under the fold
on each page, SunBasket.com was linked by photo as the Best Paleo Meal Kit of 2018. With this
makes the 13,200 mark seem much more attainable. However, the quality of the website
PaleoGrubs.com can’t be determined, as after ample searching, it would seem the site has no
connection to any people or organization. They have a book that they sell that claims to be
certified by a paleo nutritionist, but there is no mention of who this nutritionist is, how accurate
these recipes are, who the author of the book is, and even who runs the site. The best that could
be determined is that someone with the name Jess responds to people in the comments, but
information on the page is extremely lacking. Therefore, quality cannot be determined.
Looking at these sites and links, it would seem that the backlinks for SunBasket.com may
be of lower quality. 53.6% of the backlinks to SunBasket.com come from a single site of
unknown quality, and the site with the 2nd most backlinks is of low quality. Let’s look at this
compared to HomeChef.com
KellysThoughtsOnThings.com (284 links): KellysThoughtsOnThings.com is a blog website
ran by a woman named Kelly who blogs about general ideas for DIY projects, but also reviews
brands as well. She does has a seal from Blog Meets Brand, a company dedicated to connecting
social influencers with brands in ways that can help each other and inform the public. This might
lean more towards a quality link, however, I am unable to find any link to SunBasket.com at all,
even an advertisement. If the links can’t be seen, that makes them links of low quality.
CrunchyBeachMama.com (412 links): CrunchyBeachMama.com is a blog website ran by a
woman by the name of Courtney who blogs about her family and vegetarian lifestyle, as well as
reviewing some products. She actually has had a glowing review of Home Chef on her blog, and

7. might have made a deal with Home Chef as a sponsor. This site is a quality site when it comes to
links.
Milled.com (1,432 links): Milled.com is a site that contains newsletters from many
organizations that contain offers. The idea is that this site reads through newsletters for deals so
you don’t have to. Unfortunately, this means that any time SunBasket.com is linked, it is within
our own newsletter for deals being hosted on this site instead of them reading our newsletter
themselves. However, the quality of the links don’t truly suffer, as people will still link to our
site due to the deals we have. This site has quality links.
Codep35Badminton.fr (2,515 links): This site has nothing to do with commerce, food, or
anything else related to HomeChef.com. It is a website for badminton in France for young
people. There is no mention of Home Chef, however, many backlinks to HomeChef.com are
from this site. These links are questionable at best, and fraudulent at worst.
ParentingPatch.com (19, 340 links): ParentingPatch.com is once again a blog, ran by a Miss
Heather Johnson. The general focus of the site is on school and kids, with many an affiliate
backing the site, one of which is Home Chef. This explains why so many links come from this
one site, and since the affiliates of the site don’t stop with Home Chef, but also include Amazon
and Grammerly. This makes the site trustworthy. However, the amount of links on this one
domain is absurd, and I believe there to be an error somewhere and the links are staying around
even though they are unreachable.
Looking at HomeChef.com’s links, they are actually of a lower quality that those of
SunBasket.com. It has many more links, but 61.8% of those links are tied to one site of

8. questionable viewability, and 8% of the links are connected to a French site of badminton
players.
Now that we have scrubbed through backlinks, we can look into restricted domain
backlinks. A restricted domain is a domain that is held for specific official organizations in
government and education, such as .gov and .edu websites. These types of sites are taken as
better quality due to their nature a very official site. Looking at HomeChef.com, we can see that
it has backlinks from 85 restricted domains, and SunBasket.com has 28. These numbers show
that HomeChef.com still has the advantage in the area of some of the most quality sources.
Finally, we can look at the authority score. This is calculated through seeing the quality
of backlinks as well a general authority over the subject. Interestingly enough, both sites have
almost identical authority scores, with HomeChef.com at 55, and SunBasket.com at 54, meaning
that authority score is going to play less of a roll in comparing the sites. Overall, HomeChef.com
had more backlinks but of more questionable source, while SunBasket.com’s links were of better
quality.
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS
Visit Analysis
SunBasket.com HomeChef.com
Avg. Visits per month 727K 1.88M
Unique Visitors 390K 1.12M
Visits per Unique Visitor 2 (1.86) 2 (1.67)

9. Above we have the data for each of our sites given to us through SimilarWeb.com
(https://www.similarweb.com). In the context of this paper, a visit is when a device connects to
the domain of the site in question. We also need to understand that a unique visitor is not
referring to a person, but instead checks by device due to Google’s Algorithm being unable to
check who is using a device unless someone has logged in. Finally, the visits per unique visitor is
an average of how many times a device will connect to the given site in a month’s time. This
number is rounded to the nearest whole number as you cannot have a fraction of a visit. These
terms are important, as looking at how often people come to our site and from how many people
will definitely spin the Google Search Algorithm for or against us based on this type of
information
Looking at the data between the two sites, we can see that HomeChef.com gets a larger
number of visits, but with a larger amount of unique visitors, while SunBasket.com instead gets
less visits and gets a significant amount of lower unique visitors. Both sites had their visits per
unique visitor rounded to 2, although it should be pointed out that SunBasket.com did have a
higher visits per unique visitor, 1.86 to HomeChef.com’s 1.67. The reason for the differences in
data can most likely be attributed to several factors. First of all, the Home Chef demographic
tends to be larger than the Sun Basket demographic. Where Sun Basket is more niche with who it
is selling to, they are bound to get less traffic just due to that. Home Chef, being more widely
acceptable, is going to have more visitors than Sun Basket naturally. Second of all, considering
Sun Basket is a service where people want to cook food in their leisure time, it makes sense that
more visits on average come from less people, giving us a higher visits per unique visitor. If
people want to enjoy this food to the fullest, they will come back more often to look at the meals

10. again. Home Chef is more about the speed and accessibility of its service, so have less people go
to the site repeatedly is actually in Home Chef’s best interests.
Engagement Analysis
Bounce Rate
SunBasket.com HomeChef.com Web Averages
Bounce Rate % 39.87% 53.95% 40.5%
Pages per Visit 4.28 3.75 4.6
Average Visit
Duration
3:38 m 2:34 m 3:10 m
The bounce rate of a website is the rate in which a unique visitor comes to the website in
question, then immediately leaves, only visiting 1 page. When looking at the bounce rate for
SunBasket.com, we can see that it is over 10% lower than HomeChef.com’s bounce rate, and a
little under the average for webpages in general.
For Sun Basket, a lower bounce rate is exactly want you want, as this company is for
more artisan foods and the experience, so the lest people who see the site and leave immediately,
the more people are enjoying the experience. SunBasket.com has done a very good job of
keeping people looking at this food through the experience from homepage, to menu, to order,
and a lot of the retention comes from that fact. It also helps that by being USDA Organic
Certified and putting it on the main screen, people will stay for longer, as the content of the page
has risen in quality from that stamp of approval. Another reason to stay on the site is the menu.
When your service is food, the menu looking good is a top priority, and looking at

11. SunBasket.com’s menu, we can see multiple factors keeping people here from the “Menu” tab.
The picture of food that make it look delicious, there is an easy button to look at the different
menus between family and classic, and there are tags with the pictures, pointing out which dishes
are faster, soy-free, dairy-free, and many other very useful tags. Finally, the “Value” tab lists out
the values of the company to recycle, only use organic foods, to put flavor first, and more.
Having this easily accessible from the front page and building off of it will keep people of a like
mindset from leaving the site.
However, when looking at the “Pricing” page, it is a little confusing. It doesn’t do well at
expressing the information and in that, I would be worried that this is the page that might get
people to leave the site.
Pageviews Per Visit & Average Visit Duration
The pages per visit is luckily simple to explain, as it is the number of pages a unique
visitor looks at before leaving the site. Average visit duration is similar, but instead of measuring
the pages went to, it measures the time that a unique visitor spent on the site in total.
As we can see in the table, SunBasket.com visitors stay for a full minute more than
HomeChef.com, and a half minute over the web average, not to mention that people go to almost
a full page more when on SunBasket.com over HomeChef.com. However, SunBasket.com does
fall behind the web average in this aspect. I believe that these numbers are good for
SunBasket.com. People staying longer on the site means they look at the product longer, and are
more likely to spend their time and money to buy this product. A massive helper to these
numbers is the “Menu” page and the recipes within. Not only can you see the food, you can see
what will come with the recipe and the recipe itself just by clicking on it in the menu. This leads

12. people to read and look at the material longer, visiting more pages to look at other recipes and
spending more time on the site in general.
The main page that I believe to the source of many bounces and unique visitors leaving is
the “Pricing” page. It isn’t decorated as the other pages, the content within is just the prices and
that information isn’t even explained that well. This page is informational, but a few adjustments
could be made to make it less of a bounce area.
Engagement Improvement Recommendation
Looking at the engagement of SunBasket.com, I can say that the company has done a
wonderful job of creating a whole experience from first coming to the site, looking around, to
getting and cooking the food. They have people flowing in as they want and having a great time.
I do, however, think there are 2 areas that could use a slight touch to add a little more
engagement to the website, and to make it feel like it is truly built for their users.
The first, and smaller addition is to the “Menu” page. A set of buttons just below the
“Classic/Family” buttons that would let a customer not only sort by which menu corresponds test
with which price point, but also sort through the meals to see if it fits with their dietary needs.
This clicking of a button makes a not only adds another dimension of action to the page, but
makes the user feel like the site is more tailored for them and their lifestyle. Screenshots of the
possible change are below in images A and B. The blue squares could represent dairy-free, soy-
free, paleo, gluten-free, and other filters.
The second possible change is to the “Pricing” page. This currently has very little
engagement to it. It only shows information, but doesn’t really show that information well. A
new change for this page is two-fold. First of all, giving this page a little more decoration would

13. help to keep people interested. A blank white page doesn’t keep people in one spot, it makes
them want out. Second, create a small applet that asks for the amount of servings you plan on,
what menu you want to order from, and how often you want the food delivered. This gets the
user involved in the process of finding out the actual cost. They get the important information of
“how much?” as well as feel like the site cares about them, how many people, and their lifestyle.
People like doing things. Image C and D shows what the change could look like.

14. Image A: Before
Image B: After

15. Image C: Before
Image D: After