Case Study - Cruise Amour - SEO

Objectives

Cruise Amour tasked bigmouthmedia with putting together a dynamic SEO campaign to support the launch of its new site, which aimed to become the first port of call for customers looking for cruise holidays and information.

The overall scope of the project was to assist with the build and launch of the new cruiseamour.co.uk website, expected to go live in October 2010. The campaign objectives included:

• Establishing the new Cruise Amour site in the marketplace
• Generating awareness and early buzz around the site launch
• Achieving immediate traffic and brand visibility
• Sticking to the limited budget previously agreed with the client

Our Solution

The bigmouthmedia focused around four main elements:

1. Technical improvements

Cruise Amour was provided with a build document highlighting points to take into consideration when designing the site, so as to make it as accessible as possible for search engines. Amongst the technical recommendations suggested by bigmouthmedia, which included innovations as well as core requirements, were the following:

• The development of a local cache for cruise feeds to help maximise page speed load times
• The inclusion of headers and content high in the source code to improve relevance
• A clean and user friendly website design

The implementation of such recommendations was challenging at times but it was crucial to effectively support the SEO strategy.

2. Targeted market approach

Although the cruise marketplace is extremely competitive, bigmouthmedia spotted opportunities for the Cruise Amour brand and decided on a highly targeted market approach aimed at niche keywords such as:

• Competition-based terms, e.g. “cruise giveaway”
• Informational terms, e.g. “cruise holiday formality”
• Lower level regional terms, e.g. “western Mediterranean cruises”

3. Content dissemination

The targeted keyword approach was supported with a more comprehensive package including link scouting and press releases, all aimed at generating and disseminating high quality content that would boost the SEO rankings.

Link scouting through email and social platforms helped Cruise Amour establish links with deal websites for launch and liaise with bodies such as the ABTA to ensure relevant links were in place to develop Cruise Amour’s early authority.

4. Innovations

In addition to the traditional social and email sharing tools included on site to increase link sharing, innovations such as Open Graph have been used. The Open Graph mark-up enabled Cruise Amour to increase its social visibility, through strong calls to action and excellent imagery.

Cruise Amour also implemented an image sitemap to make use of the imagery of the cruise ships and location, and is in the process of adding Microformats for reviews. All of these innovations highlight Cruise Amour’s commitment to providing accurate and friendly information to cruisers and expanding out the information available within the results pages.