Case Study - Door2Tour - SEO

Objectives

Door2Tour.com wanted to become the market leader in the coach holidays sector in the UK and to this purpose it engaged bigmouthmedia at the start of 2010. The overall objective was to increase the online presence and grow the market share of Door2Tour’s relatively small brand, which included generating brand awareness amongst tour operators as well as consumers. The core objectives included:

• Increase search visibility and exposure
• Increase traffic for coach related terms
• Build traffic for non-coach related terms
• Achieve a substantial ROI

Our Solution

1. Initial analysis and implementation of best practices

Bigmouthmedia carried out an in-depth technical analysis of the Door2Tour site. When reviewing the site a number of restrictions, which were reducing the site’s organic performance, were uncovered; they included the site structure as well as technical and on-page issues.

The Door2tour-bigmouthmedia team set about correcting these issues and implementing best practices in order to give the campaign a secure starting point. Getting the fundamentals in place early was key to making the strategy work.

2. Strategic seasonal approach

Looking at the web analytics reports, bigmouthmedia discovered that users were visiting the Door2Tour site for a variety of specic events and tours, such as the climax of Dancing on Ice, the British Grand Prix and the Edinburgh Tattoo. To take advantage of this interest the agency suggested pushing link building activity and page creation related to those topics and using PR and Door2Tour’s contacts within the industry to raise the popularity of their tours.

Bigmouthmedia’s strategy also involved creating landing pages for a number of destinations and tours. With the focus on seasonality, work also began in the summer in spotting opportunities to maximise Christmas and New Year traffic through a variety of specific keywords and pages targeting different types of breaks and capturing search space for 2010-related terms, such as ‘Christmas Market Breaks’ and ‘New Year Breaks 2010’.

In tandem with this, bigmouthmedia’s insight allowed Door2Tour to take advantage of searcher behaviour and target 2011 terms from the second half of 2010 throughout January and February 2011, smashing traffic records for the time of the year.

3.Enhanced Focus on social in search

Aware of the impending value of social in search, the third stage involved using social media not only to benefit Door2Tour as a brand and to facilitate consumer engagement, but also to help the brand stay ahead of the curve. This was particularly in anticipation of the late 2010 Google and Bing announcements surrounding the social signals now being taken into account for ranking factors.

The social media aspects of the campaign included:

• The creation and active use of Twitter and then Facebook to engage potential consumers and generally raise interest in the brand.
• Secondly, Door2Tour created a blog on the recommendation of bigmouthmedia as a way of engaging their users by offering inspiration and ideas on places to travel. As part of the blog, Door2Tour so far have conducted interviews with big west end stars such as Sheridan Smith.

As a result Door2Tour are creating fresh content for the site as well as promoting their blog and ideas through social media, thus increasing user experience and brand perception and at the same time supporting online search efforts.