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Cornwall Holiday Lets
(www.cornwallholidaylets.net)
Campbell Investments manage a selection of self catering luxury holiday apartments in Newquay, Cornwall, South West England.
They also have a French and German translated version of their site with mirrored content.
The site looks and feels very professional, but much of the navigation is done in Javascript and as a consequence wasn't getting the attention it needed to make an impact in the search engine rankings.
This is a very competitive field, with probably several million websites devoted to the letting of private holiday accommodation, hotels, apartments, guest houses, bed and breakfast, caravan sites and camping sites. So whichever way we looked at this, we were in for a lot of work, all uphill.
My original assessment of this project was to go and look online for Cornwall Holiday Lets, using a variety of search terms and keyword phrases. Unfortunately, Cornwall Holiday Lets was proving very elusive, and after checking what should have been several high ranking keywords, keyword phrases and search terms for this site, was unable to find it in the top 250. Actually, I didn't even find it then.......... I just stopped when I got to 250. A luxury you don't have with potential visitors.
If your customer can't find you, typically in the top 30 of any search listing, they won't find you by that route at all. It is unusual for the public, your customers, to dig much deeper than that.
However, Cornwall Holiday Lets were getting hits. Lots of them. So where were these hits coming from, if not directly from the search engines? It turns out that quite a few sites link in, like the Cornwall Tourist Board and several other directories that provide traffic to holiday letting sites. Now, this is brilliant! Because it already means there is a good link structure in place to bring in traffic.
Search engines love this type of inward linking by relevant sites and also outward linking to relevant sites (these can be attractions, services, information from the actual map area) by the host site.
So, what was actually letting the site down in terms of it's search engine listing was the fact that Googlebot, and other spiders, were finding the pages from the outside links, but were being put off by the coding they found when they got there, and therefore reduced Cornwall Holiday Lets rankings accordingly. A bit like being promised a Rick Stein restaurant meal only to find Macdonalds when they got there.
This is where we had to plan our campaign (myself and the site owner) and make the changes that would attract the spiders, giving them something to index, but also to configure the pages so that spiders would assign importance to the same things we thought were relevant to our business model and customer base. By marrying those three elements, we are able to increase our rankings in the search results and ensure that our customers are able to find us.
What was the result of all this work?
I am currently in the process of analyzing the last two years of stats and comparing these to the latest figures, as they appear, to see what effect the changes are having on the numbers of visitors and conversion to sales ratios.
This is highly fluid work and results can fluctuate wildly over short periods, so it's important not to panic. Mainly this is because other peoples sites are also being updated or changed and extra pages added, which changes their relevance compared to yours in the short term. But over the long term, if you stick to the rules, using proper Search Engine Optimization techniques, which includes top copy and coding, you will maintain a long term high relevancy over other sites short term gains.
Update 1: Cornwall Holiday Lets demonstrates that within one month (based on the Google cycle) we were achieving a substantial increase in traffic, which is search engine based, in addition to the original link based traffic. Indeed, recent checks show that Google results are improving with 8 very important keyword phrases for Cornwall Holiday Lets, producing links in the top 75. These are coming back (at the time of checking) in position numbers 10, 15, 27 and 33. And now, several others appear up to 90 in a page of 100 results.
This is a substantial improvement in a relatively short time, one which I shall monitor and report on here as time permits.
Visit Cornwall Holiday Lets
Update 2: It is now a whole month since this work was done and uploaded. I've been looking at last years visitor numbers, comparing them to this years for the same days and months. Whilst prior to the Search Engine Optimization work being done to the site, there was a small but progressive increase in visitor numbers over the year, from the time this phase of the SEO work and subsequent Search Engine indexing took place, the traffic increase in reported Unique Visitors has been an astounding 176%.
Fingers crossed that this trend will continue unabated.
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