Grand Strand Resorts

Background

Grand Strand Resorts & BuildUp Bookings have been working together since early 2014. During this time, BuildUp Bookings has focused on driving traffic through search (organic + paid) and creating a winning SEO strategy to rank better and get more direct bookings.

Grand Strand Resorts has had nearly zero presence on the popular vacation listing sites HomeAway, VRBO, Flipkey & Airbnb — direct bookings is the only acquisition channel that drive the engine of their business. As a result, organic traffic is the single largest driver of leads and online bookings for the North Myrtle Beach-based company.

Facing a competitive marketplace with both listing sites and established local competition, Grand Strand Resorts was looking for massive growth with their organic search traffic.

Opportunities & Areas to Address

Over the years, the website had collected lots of duplicate and poor-quality content – a plan was needed to clean and organize this mass of content.

The website itself had errors & problems – broken links, duplicate meta descriptions, keyword-stuffed title tags and a lack of overall organization.

Quality of new content (blog posts) was very low, leading to bloated and useless WordPress tag pages and almost zero engagement on area guides and other traveler-focused content.

No relevant links had been built to the website in months – a bad signal for search engines like Google to rank the website better.

Planning & Execution

First, dozens of low-quality pages were cleaned up, redirected and removed from the website.

All meta and page content was revisited: complete sections had brand-new metadata added while others needed attention in other ways to get refreshed.

New relevant blog post topics were researched to provide better guest engagement, knock out relevant keywords and clean up the problem-ridden structure of the WordPress blog.

Link building outreach was performed to bring brand-new mentions and links to the website – both local businesses and travel media publications were targets with excellent success and link growth.

Overall Results

Each year organic traffic has grown YOY by at least 25% — during the first 6 months of the engagement organic traffic grew almost 75% YOY.
Google organic traffic is now the #1 referring source of bookings, accounting for over $1,000,000 in just online bookings during 2016.
Pageviews from organic traffic eclipsed 1.8M per year for the first time in the history of the company since Google Analytics was added.
Paid search budgets including AdWords & Bing Ads were trimmed thus increasing profitability for the past two years — supplanting the need to rely on just paid traffic to reach quarterly goals.