SEO Case Study for a Travel Company
This travel SEO case study is for Follow the Camino. They are a specialist travel company that offers tours of the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
Client Background
Follow the Camino are a part of the One Foot Abroad brand. They offer tailored walking and cycling holidays along the Camino de Santiago. One Foot Abroad sells walking holidays with an emphasis on sustainability.
The project’s aim was to increase company revenue by increasing relevant traffic in three main geographical areas: the US and Canada, the UK, and Ireland.
Gone are the days when SEO stands apart from all other digital marketing strategies. We needed to ensure the marketing efforts were integrated – including offline advertising. This means we needed to ensure performance was outstanding in all the following areas:
- Branding across all channels
- Google Ads management
- Facebook social management and retargeting
- Testimonials on various platforms
- UX and CRO
- Lead generation goals and tracking, integrated with the sales CRM
Challenge Faced
We started working with Follow the Camino in July 2016. They initially hired us for a technical SEO audit. Their website had been hacked, made possible by an error on the part of their hosting company, and they needed to make sure everything had been cleaned up.
(Note on the above image: I prefer using third-party stats, as I dislike publicly sharing clients’ analytics data. SEMRush provides this graph)
We Started With an SEO Audit
The audit laid the groundwork for all future actions to be taken on the website. Our audit checked every possible issue that may be holding a website back from ranking higher and provided solutions to all the problems.
Follow the Camino completed the work needed after the audit in-house and returned a few months later when we performed the second audit. From this, we crafted a plan to optimise the site and reviewed all the existing content.
The SEO Strategy
After the audit, we created a long-term SEO strategy and roadmap that first aimed to answer search queries that asked specific questions (i.e.target long-tail keywords). The second and main head terms ranking goals have now been met, and the website ranks for keywords that drive thousands of visitors per month.
1
Travel Competition Research
We were fortunate as I had built my first website in 2006 and it was about the Camino. I therefore knew the competition already.
2
Content Planning
We crawled the website to create a full list of all the content on the website. We then decided what content was worth keeping as is, what needed to be rewritten, and what would be deleted (and/or 301 redirected).
3
Writing & Publishing
All marketing staff from Follow the Camino have walked the route at least once, which ensured that all content was deep, detailed and factually correct. To ensure everything went smoothly and to upskill their internal marketing team, we arranged a call every week.
4
Link Building
For most websites, this will be an ongoing process. Between Follow the Camino and BeFound’s staff writers, we have created great guides that have been published on highly relevant websites.
5
Analytics & Optimisation
Using analytics, we recorded which pages resulted in customer sign-ups, optimised those pages further, and created more content around those topics.
Results and Outcomes
Within 6 months, Google organic traffic had increased by over 100%. Year on year increases is now running between 180% and 200%.
Comparing May 2016 to May 2018, the figures are incredible, but we started from a fairly low bottom with a company that has been in business for 14 years.
These increases have directly translated into increased revenue.
Conclusions
The company started at a low bottom due to the hacked website. Once that was resolved we focused on:
- content marketing
- link building
The combination of well written content and backlinks, resulted in a successful project.
You can read more about our Travel SEO services here, or why not chat with us to see if we can help?
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