July 22, 2015

Knowsley Safari Park

Knowsley Safari Park turned to Prodo when traffic levels to their website were dwindling, tasking them with driving interest and improving their SEO ranking. Prodo fill us in

Brief

Prior to starting the campaign in May 2012, site traffic levels were stagnating, showing no particular growth even in the strongest seasonal periods during the summer months. Prodo’s task was to increase traffic to the website, improve their SEO ranking and bring more visitors to the park.

Strategy

The target audiences for the campaign were:

• Families in the north west looking for a memorable day out involving animals and a range of other activities
• Groups, especially those on school trips
• Animal lovers and people who are interested in conservation and preserving animal welfare

Our SEO strategy included both on-page and off-page activity to appeal to these demographics. We identified and actioned key on-page changes to the landing pages, after extensive keyword analysis and competitor research, to ensure that these were optimised with high-level keywords. This gave us the strong foundation needed to build an off-page strategy which, in turn, would result in natural rankings and traffic.

Execution

At the start of the campaign, we suggested creating a ‘days out’ page that would enable us to achieve strong results within a relatively short timeframe. This worked really well, particularly when we were able to gain prominence in a highly competitive ‘days out’ organic space. The organic traffic volume for this page was significant, so we wanted to capitalise on this. We consequently suggested design, layout and content amends to improve this.

(http://www.knowsleysafariexperience.co.uk/days-out)

Result

Organic traffic has improved significantly since we started the campaign in 2012. From July 2013, we have really been able to improve upon this strong foundation.

As this is a seasonal business, we compared July 2013 with July 2014 to help offer a reliable comparison:

– There was a 64 per cent increase in organic traffic, from 43,232 to 70,981 visits
– The highly competitive ‘days out’ phrases continued to improve and, since July 2013, 7,640 visits had been delivered to this page

We had been working closely with social on certain campaigns and, through this collaboration, the number of followers has risen from 29,136 to 57,769 – an increase of 98.3 per cent.