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Brief
Audley Travel specialises in tailor-made individual itineraries for discerning travellers seeking authentic experiences around the world. With the specialist travel industry becoming more competitive Audley Travel wanted to ensure it had a prominent position online and increase the number of visitors to its website.
Strategy
A highly successful partnership between Audley Travel’s in-house team and SEOptimise delivered an integrated search engine optimisation (SEO), Pay Per-Click (PPC) and social media campaign.
The main focus of the project was from an SEO perspective, where targets were set to a) improve the visibility of Audley Travel in the search engines for competitive travel queries, and b) to improve the volume of key words and long-tail terms which were delivering traffic into the site.
SEOptimise carried out a website audit, market analysis and keyword research including PPC and analytics. From the results they set business orientated goals and SEO targets for the campaign.
Execution
SEO
A re-designed and re-developed website was launched pre-Christmas 2009. Most of the development took place in-house, and SEOptimise consulted on the SEO implications and best practice. This involved managing redirects and content optimisation to ensure that a) traffic was maintained just before the peak travel booking season in January, and b) that the site was well-optimised.
The key to the campaign’s success was bringing together social media with paid and organic search to attract visits from different stages of the consumer buying cycle. Evaluating the quality and cost-effectiveness of keywords via paid search ensured only the most valuable traffic sources to the business were targeted. As a result the quality of the traffic targeted organically was high, converting visitors that contributed to a significant increase in online enquiry levels.
PPC
Alongside the SEO work, SEOptimise began to manage Audley’s PPC campaign in October 2009. The main goal here was to combine the search strategies more effectively and reduce paid search costs by targeting proven converting traffic organically.
Social media
In early 2010 the ‘Audley Traveller’ magazine section on the website was launched. This provides frequently updated travel content and inspirational ideas. SEOptimise’s role was to optimise the new content for search, aimed at targeting different types of keyword queries and visitors at an earlier, more research-based stage in the buying cycle. Plus, this also allowed the promotion of content that was more suitable to social media audiences and appealing to travel bloggers.
Content on the main website was not geared to grab the attention of bloggers, journalists and social media audiences. However, the magazine site could now attract natural inbound links by targeting this new audience more specifically. In working with Audley, SEOptimise advised how to use Twitter to successfully interact, promote content and generate positive attention within the travel industry.
The ITV series ‘Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World’ was also used to target traffic from social media audiences. Content about the TV series was added to Audley Travel’s website, including an itinerary that travellers could follow featuring some of the highlights of the comedian’s journey through Canada's Northwest Passage.
Results
SEO
Since the start of the project to early 2009, organic traffic increased by a staggering 196% due to an increase in search volume and search engine rankings for a wide range of optimised key terms. The trend in traffic has continued to grow, with a further 8% increase in organic traffic experienced when comparing traffic like-for-like from January to March 2009 with January to March 2010. Overall, traffic to the website has increased by 142%.
PPC
The main PPC goal - to combine the search strategies more effectively and reduce paid search costs by targeting proven converting traffic organically - was achieved by maintaining the level of leads, whilst decreasing the overall advert spend costs by 30% (comparing January – April 2009 with January – April 2010). The PPC conversion rate is currently up by 36% compared to the same period in 2009. This has proved extremely successful, with Audley no longer advertising via PPC in many areas as they have reached maximum capacity on sales on the current levels of online leads.
Social media
The promotion of the Audley Magazine content generated 35,762 visits since its launch in March 2010, and 22,138 visits were directed from social media promotion through StumbleUpon. One post on ‘Audley Traveller’ (World’s Best Landscapes) generated 7,421 visits alone from StumbleUpon.
Combined, the social media and search campaign, which included using the ITV series ‘Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World’ to target traffic from social media audiences, generated several thousand visits directly to this single piece of content on their website during the six weeks the Billy Connolly show was screened.
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