Case Study

Travel Destination

SEO

Details

Industry: Travel & Tourism
Company Size: $3b+ annual impact
Date: 2015-Present

Client is a tourism bureau representing a highly-traveled county in the Eastern United States. Their marketing and business development initiatives have led to $3.42 billion in annual revenue for the county. Transistor has worked with this client since 2015 and has supported continuous organic traffic growth, new site development support and complex analytics and testing programs.

Challenges

There have been a few major challenges with this client over our long relationship. The first challenge was technology. They were using an outdated platform and mobile site that was struggling to compete in the mobile world. The next hurdle was and continues to be, how to compete with Google rich results to get people to the client’s site rather than use Google alone for travel information. The final challenge, which has been amplified in 2020, was the dependence on people being able to and willing to travel.

Overcoming Antiquated Technology

Early on in our partnership with this client we migrated their mobile-only and desktop-only sites into one easy-to-use response experience. This migration has led to an overwhelming increase in mobile traffic, which now makes up more than 70% of all traffic to the site.

Since that migration we have continued to work with the internal team to launch new tracking and testing programs. We are also preparing to launch a new site in the coming year.

Competing with Google’s Rich Results

Since inception, Google has continuously improved and enhanced their search engine results page (SERP). In 2004 it was the launch of local results, 2013 was the local carousel, 2015 was the start of People Also Ask and Featured Snippets. All of these additions are focused on giving users more information within the SERP, the problem is that this has been a major hit to tourism sites. These sites used to be focused on giving addresses to their businesses, lists of local attractions and general travel recommendations. Now Google can do all of these things.

We have been tasked with understanding the moves that Google is making and continually shifting our organic search strategy to overcome any loss in traffic due to new features. We have supported the growth of local and editorial content to provide high-quality information that Google can not.

Evolving Content Based on Environment

Since the beginning of our partnership, we have discussed who to target and how to target people looking to travel to the area. We have led the efforts to focus not only on people already interested in traveling to their destination but also people generally looking to travel, which has been an incredibly successful initiative. What we had not anticipated with COVID-19, which turned the travel industry upside down.

In tandem with a wonderful internal marketing team, we have shifted all content and search initiatives to be focused on how to support the local community. This included providing more detailed information on outdoor activities, restaurants with take out and more. This pivot was instrumental in the continued success of the site. Even during a pandemic the site’s traffic increased by 6.5% in the second half of 2020 (comparing year-over-year organic sessions).