Expedia: 94% Ranking Boost Across 43,660 Destination Pages

The Challenge

Five languages, seven territories, six different products lines and more than 20 different projects. We've consistently delivered growth for Expedia over nine years. And while we've worked on product lines including flights, holidays and activities, the focus of our work has been the flagship hotels line.

At the start of 2022, Expedia had seen organic traffic decline since 2020 on certain areas of its 'hotels in' pages – critical commercial pages that are major revenue drivers.

The Work

We started by reviewing historical performance, comparing pre-pandemic traffic and conversion rates with 2022 to understand exactly where declines had happened and where the focus for improvement should be.

Research and diagnosis

Covering over 43,000 different destination pages from Aberystwyth to Zurich, this project was all about scale. We used our large-scale keyword research process to analyse and cluster keywords into themes and syntaxes to identify trends at scale. That helped us identify underlying causes for traffic declines.

Large-scale optimisation for maximum impact

Next came competitor analysis to review how Expedia ranked against the competition. Then we reviewed the wider search opportunity for the full destination sets to identify gaps. Now we were able to find the opportunities for optimisation. The outputs were expected, but we rolled them out to all pages:

• New title optimisations
• Page header optimisations
• Rewrites and updates to on-page content
• Recommendations for new keyword targets that Expedia were under-indexed for relative to competitors and gaps identified in SERPs
• Technical changes to the page template to make sure all necessary content was accessible to search bots

Good SEO = good UX: Learning the best from the rest

Finally we reviewed on-page content modules and functionality compared with competitor sites. We found and categorised a range of useful and helpful content additions to bring onto landing pages that we could be confident Google would value. We explored large key competitors and specialist niche competitors, which led us to ideas for on-page UX improvements including price trend tracking and optimisation of card images.

The Outcome

The chart above shows Expedia's organic visibility trajectory from AHREFs data, with our partnership beginning in June 2015. The data clearly shows the pandemic impact across 2020 and 2021, followed by our successful large-scale optimisation strategy that delivered 94% growth in top rankings by 2023.

The project yielded a 94% increase year-on-year in keywords ranking in the top 3 positions across the full 43,660 pages. It also resulted in a 73% increase in clicks.

As well as measurable increases in ranking and SERP performance, our recommendations led to 12 new test-and-learn projects. That created a ripple effect of improvements.

It's one of many projects where we increased performance and delivered growth to Expedia, and one where we got to use our full range of analytical, strategic and technical skills.