Hilltoptreks: 296% Increase In Leads Over 10 Months

01

Background

Hilltoptreks is an award winning tour operating company providing services like guided walks and walking tours spanning the whole country of Ireland. The business’s success revolves around its online presence, namely their website, which has been built up over the years to provide a large variety of booking options to a large combinations of formats and destinations.

When the Hilltoptreks team initially reached out to us with the help of the TOV grant, they were in the dark when it came to organic conversions. Relying heavily on referrals and other offline means of customer attraction, the business did not have a solid search engine strategy in place, and as it became clear - their website was not ready for this method of marketing.

Guided by their direction and industry knowledge we put together an SEO strategy that was focused heavily on gaining exposure for those offerings that were most profitable, and would bring a tangible return on investment (mind you, we were in the midst of a pandemic).

02

The Challenge

Hilltoptreks is considered a successful and well known company in its industry, even gaining some recognition in a recent article by Discover Ireland. Its primary target audience would be people with a love of travel and the drive to discover new & interesting places not only in Dublin, but across Ireland as well. Online marketing, namely SEO, was an obvious choice for attracting fresh potential customers.

Before getting involved with Aspire, Hilltoptreks had some success in the organic space, we have to give them that, and was able to attract some consistent traffic. However, when the 2020 season came round, it became apparent that competitors had managed to gain the upper hand and traffic along with relevant leads significantly decreased in volume.

Being that the business was of seasonal nature, our task was to overcome this setback as quickly as possible and find a viable solution for the improvement of search rankings for appropriate terms while the season’s offerings were still in demand.

03

Our Approach

Taking into consideration the client’s monthly SEO budget, and the directions as to where the primary focus should be for this campaign we put together a strategy to improve a number of the organisation’s departments: Self Guided Walking Holidays in Ireland, Guided Walking Holidays in Ireland, Private Day Tours of Ireland to Dublin, and Day Tours from Dublin. For the duration of this campaign we focused on this set of services and put all of our efforts to increase their exposure in Google Search.

After spending some time becoming familiar with the structure of the website, we were able to map each landing page to a set of keywords, and provided recommendations on how to best utilise the content and allow search engines to easily understand our intentions regarding keywords targeting. Our recommendations included suggestions for important SEO factors such as keyword density, word count, and heading tags, as well as strategic conversion-aimed factors like testimonial placement, and booking call to actions (CTAs).

Following the optimisation process, we needed to strengthen the reputation of the landing pages, and the website as a whole in Google’s eyes. This was achieved through the process of link building, taking advantage of the powerful backlink building tactic of guest posting, and strategically placed anchors linking back to the appropriate web pages on the website.

04

Results

By analysing Google Search Console data we were able to identify keywords with great potential. We knew that by optimising targeted landing pages for the right keywords we were able to increase visibility & organic traffic, so this simple approach allowed us to improve ranking positions for over 20 “money” keywords.

Our high quality link building campaign, along with very precise targeting led to a drastic increase in organic traffic & users of over 100% compared to the previous year. Because we focused on terms that had a rather low monthly search volume, but had the correct intent, meaning the searcher was generally looking to make a purchase, we began to bring in more conversions for these keywords, which translated to more sales for the business.

In fact, we doubled revenue and increased transactions by 296%. As the return on investment in SEO was clearly apparent, the team at Hilltoptreks had no problem continuing to work with us, which has resulted in accelerated growth, particularly in the last few months.