Search Engine Marketing Case Study - traffic up by 60%
May 14th, 2008 | by Peter Cullen |Here is a Search Engine Marketing case study about a hotel website that has sceen an increase in traffic of over 100% year on year using the same techniques that are implemented in Interleado’s SEO Business Intelligence Suite.
This case study looks at the impact that focused changes had on a website over the period of one year.
We started with a website that had no real work done on it during the previous 2/3 years. When I say no real work I mean no focused effort was put into thinking about how to promote the website. The focus had been on building the brand of the business, and providing integration with their thrid party online booking system. The business in question is in the hospitality business, its a hotel.
When we started the traffic from the 11th March 07 - 31st March 07 was 2657 visitors during a three week period.
One year later, the traffic graph for that same website, for the same three week period, showed 4324 visitors during the same three week period.
That’s an increase of over 60% in visitor traffic when compared year on year for the same three week period.
So what website marketing strategy was used to achieve this result?
We started with a business analysis of the company.
The purpose of this exercise is to :
- Understand how the business describes what it does, what langauage it uses
- Following on from the first goal, we then want to list the words that the business thinks it should be ranking well for
- Learn about the goals that the business has for its website, i.e. what action does it want its visitors to take?
The next stage of website marketing strategy was to research what keywords are actually being used by potential customers. Its very important to realise that the language used by a lot of businesses to describe what they do, is not the language used by the market place.
A perfect example is my own industry, We use SEO, SEM, SMM - does this mean anything to most people? Probably not, so its important we use Internet Marketing, Website Marketing Strategy, Social Media Online Marketing, you may still be a bit clueless, but at least you recognise the language and use when searching.
After we had gathered the keywords and agreed the keyword phrases we wanted to target, we moved onto the next stage.
One of the most important elements of a webpag are the words used to describe the page, or the meta data. The two most important meta data elements are the title and description tags.
As a general rule all web pages should have a unique title and descirption tag and they sohuld be aligned with the text in the body of the web page.
A good title tag is simple a string of text, at least 60-65 characters in length that includes your keywords and ideally gives a very short description of the web page. There are two reasons why this tag is so important;
- The search engines use it when indexing your web content and they put a fair amount of emphasis on this tag when determining relevancy
- People searching the web will see your title tag text in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), so it impacts on conversion before anybody has even seen your website.
The image below highlights where the title text is shown in the SERP.The text that is highlighted in blue is the title text, so as this is the first thing that people searching see, its important to put in your keywords and give a reason to click.
The Description tag also play and important role in telling the search engines what keywords are important for your business. In this tag you can put in up to 250 characters (including spaces). This is also an important tag as it may be used in the SERP (as shown in the previous page) below the title text.
When writing the this tag try to use three to four of your keywords and ensure that these keywords are used in the boby of the web page.
So, where do you find the title and description tags? They are placed between the <head> and </head> tags. If you go to your browser and click on File > View > View Source, you’ll see at the top of the page a <head> tag and inside that you’ll see the <title> and <description> tags.
Editing these is quite straight forward, but if you are uncomfortable doing this just write yoru new text for the tags and give them to your web designer.
One last point on these tags, when writing them, try to eliminate filler words, words that have no real meaning or relevance for your website. The more targeted the text, the better your changes of getting good rankings and more traffic.
The next stage of the web strategy was to revamp the sitempa on the page. A site is a web page that tells the seach engines what pages are on yoru website and it also acts as a useful index for your website for visitors that are looking for something or are lost.
A good sitemap will list the web pages using keywords and also append a sentence or two of text to each links. This text will describe the page, but again it will include keywords in the description.
A sitemap that is not fully optimised will only show links and will have no descriptive text.
If you make these changes alone, you website will get a big boost in rankings, maybe not as much as 60%, maybe more than 60%? It depends on the keywords and target countries you are competing in.
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