Case studies
The Hotel Guru
WHAT WE DID
Combining technical SEO and content strategy to increase organic traffic
56% increased organic traffic
118% increased clickthrough rate
141% increased visibility
WHAT WE DID
Combining technical SEO and content strategy to increase organic traffic
56% increase in organic search traffic
118% increased clickthrough rate
114% increased visibility
The challenge
The Hotel Guru is a successful hotel content curation website that came to us when they had suffered a drastic drop in search rankings and traffic. The team tasked us with identifying what the cause of their ranking drop was, and devising a strategy and recommendations to recover their position. A key success requirement was to get The Hotel Guru back to its previous maximum revenue position, seen during spring 2016.
On initial investigation, we discovered the traffic drop correlated with two Google updates – Panda and Phantom. This set us on a clear path, with a solution we knew would work.
What we did
To understand the full scope of issues we carried out a series of reviews, including a technical SEO audit, ranking analysis, content audit and competitor analysis. We also provided extensive keyword research.
From our reviews and keyword research we were quickly able to provide initial recommendations, before beginning to map out the entire search opportunity for long-term SEO growth.
Combining technical SEO with on-page expertise, we reviewed two years of analytics data and changes in historic rankings to identify patterns of ranking drops. This process identified clear over-optimisation and on-page technical changes that were obstructing Google’s rendering of The Hotel Guru’s key landing pages.
Correcting over-optimisation isn’t always as clear as ‘cut down the keywords’. Instead our team provided a strategy of detailed changes which needed to be made to the on-page copy to reduce the over-optimisation. The plan and level of detail made it simple for The Hotel Guru’s content team to make the changes themselves.Meanwhile, we also provided guidelines for on-page developer changes, which were designed to improve page indexation.
Over the course of the project we worked closely with The Hotel Guru’s content team and developer agency to remedy both issues.
Outcome
As a result of our recommendations, The Hotel Guru returned results 1.5 times higher than their previous maximum revenue position, and their website achieved a 141% increase in search visibility year-on-year.
They also saw a 56% increase in organic traffic year-on-year and an average reduction of 36% in the site’s bounce rate. Importantly, our work also contributed to a 118% increase in clickthrough rates to their booking.com affiliate pages year-on-year.
We continue to advise Hotel Guru on the roll-out of hreflang optimisation across their targeted countries.
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