278% Year-on-Year Traffic Growth for Follow the Camino

Follow the Camino are 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.

Project goals

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.

Marketing integration priorities included:

• 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

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.

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 in-house work after the first audit and returned months later for a second audit. From this, we crafted a plan to optimise the site and reviewed all the existing content.

After the audit, we created a long-term SEO strategy and roadmap that first aimed to answer search queries that asked specific questions, in other words, target long-tail keywords.

Travel competition research

We were fortunate. The first website built here was in 2006 and it was about the Camino, so the competition was already familiar.

Content planning

We crawled the website to create a full list of all the content on the site. We then decided what content was worth keeping as is, what needed to be rewritten, and what would be deleted (and 301 redirected).

Writing and 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. Weekly coordination calls were arranged to upskill their internal marketing team.

Link building

Between Follow the Camino and BeFound’s staff writers, we have created strong guides that have been published on highly relevant websites.

Analytics and optimisation

Using analytics, we recorded which pages resulted in customer sign-ups, optimised those pages further, and created more content around those topics.

These increases have directly translated into increased revenue.

• First six months: Google organic traffic increased by over 100%
• Year-on-year rate: now running between 180% and 200%
• May 2016 to May 2018 comparison: 278% year-on-year traffic increase

The company started at a low bottom due to the hacked website. Once that was resolved we focused on content marketing and link building.

The combination of well written content and backlinks resulted in a successful project. For travel and tour operators competing across multiple geographies, the lesson is that a clean technical foundation, a long-term content roadmap built around real search questions, and consistent link building from relevant publishers compound into sustained organic growth that feeds revenue.