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Brief
Oxford Hotels and Inns owns and operates 42 hotels in over 30 counties throughout the British Isles. Oxford Hotels and Inns was formed in September 2006 with an ambitious multi-million pound investment program.
Oxford Hotels and Inns is a fast growing hotel group that invests in distinctive properties around the UK, offering a range of venues to suit visitors from the three-star and four-star luxury of the Oxford Collection, to character hotels in England and Scotland. Catering for all types of visitor, Oxford Hotels and Inns group have the ideal place to stay whether you are looking for a night, weekend or week in a hotel with fine dining, golfing, corporate business, and spa or wedding facilities.
Understanding the fundamental necessity for a website, Oxford Hotels and Inns launched www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com quickly to support customers, however found that the site was not operating to obtain maximum optimised rankings in Google. Oxford Hotels and Inns wanted to attract increasing volume of the estimated 14 million Google searches for ‘England Hotels’ with an average 135,000 searches for ‘UK Hotels’. (Statistics for 2009 extracted from Google AdWords analysis correct at time of writing in dec 2009).
Strategy
As the hotel, leisure and travel industry becomes more competitive, search engines are rapidly becoming an important tool to capture, convert and engage with potential customers performing searches for hotel venues.
Typically focusing on specific geographical areas i.e. UK, a theme or activity which caters to a particular customer desire i.e. offer dining, golfing, corporate or private banqueting, Oxford Hotels and Inns competes amongst highly competitive hotel and leisure industry websites to appear in the natural list on the first page of search results.
“We have always had an aggressive growth strategy in place for Oxford Hotels and Inns and wanted to drive as much business as possible from our newly launched website www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com. We knew that gaining high natural rankings in search engines would have greatest long term benefit to our business, and so needed to ensure that our new website was fully optimized through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in order to achieve the results we wanted. Implementing a two pronged SEO and PPC plan, we chose PPC to drive immediate results whilst planning to meet our long term strategic goals by building online authority through SEO.”
Managing Director, Oxford Hotels and Inns
Recognising that improving the natural rankings of the website in search engines was essential to ensure the visibility of www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com, Oxford Hotels Head of Marketing and E Commerce looked for solutions that would integrate into the businesses growth marketing strategy. Oxford Hotels and Inns assessed a number of vendors and solutions before selecting the fixed fee Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) from Vertical Leap.
Execution
“Our decision to bring in Vertical Leap was the right one. During our evaluation of SEO vendors, Vertical Leap was open and positive whilst at the same time keeping our expectations realistic. The level of service is outstanding and delivers genuine results.”
Head of Marketing and E Commerce
With further increases in searches for UK based hotels in 2009* both supporting and escalating the relevancy of online marketing as part of the strategic marketing program, Oxford Hotels and Inns Head of Marketing and E Commerce is convinced of the value of SEO as part of Oxford Hotels and Inns ongoing plans. (*based on trends analysis from Google Trends search term = Hotels in UK)
Results
The results substantiate Oxford Hotels and Inns decision to implement SEO, increasing web traffic to www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com from the natural Google search rankings from 4000 visitors a month at the time of inception, to 36,000 in 5 months. An overall increase of 900%.
The introduction of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) also impacted the visibility of www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com to Google searches.
By choosing to expand the number of specific business critical phrases or search terms for the website from 1200 to 5-6000 phrases a month, www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com is a returned result on a wider range of search terms. By concentrating on the unique attraction of the Oxford Hotels and Inns the business is able to develop its search longtail. This has paid dividends, providing a larger cross section of opportunities to attract and engage prospective customers who are further along the buying cycle.
“SEO from Vertical Leap has definitely worked for us. We have seen traffic build up steadily over time, which we know has had a positive impact on our business. The regular updates and reports from our Campaign Delivery Manager on the status of our campaign help us identify the statistics behind www.oxfordhotelsandinns.com’s place in the search rankings and plan for the seasonal peaks and falls.”
Head of Marketing and E Commerce
Building on existing successes, Oxford Hotels and Inns is looking to introduce SEO for the list of top hotels in the group’s Oxford Collection of luxury, handpicked hotels in Scotland and throughout the rest of the British Isles.
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