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
Results & A New Focus
- 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