Arctic Direct are the leading online luxury Arctic travel agency based in the UK. They have been organising holidays, educational tours and corporate trips to the Arctic for the last 18 years. Since we started to work with Arctic Direct in October 2022 we were tasked to increase the number of high quality online inquiries and to maximise their visibility across high volume keywords & important focuses such as ‘northern lights holidays’ and ‘glass igloo holidays’.
Arctic Direct came to us with key focuses in terms of keywords and particular segments of their business which provides the highest ROI for them, they wanted us to prioritise this when looking at the overall SEO strategy and building out our longer term road map.
Secondly, we were tasked to look into what the competitors were currently ranking for and how we can compete within this area and to also look into new targets which Arctic Direct can potentially utilise in order to create holiday packages based on the search demand.
We were also assigned to stay ahead of the game for the following peak holiday seasons so once we approached these busy periods our optimisations were already in place.
Something which is very important to Arctic Direct is receiving high quality inquiries from potential customers who are looking into booking a luxury trip compared to a cheap getaway, we took this into consideration when building our strategy and what keywords will be a priority to target. Conversions were measured through their online booking form.
Research.
Using our previous experience within the travel industry, our strategy was to begin with extensive keyword research, analysing what our competitors were currently doing and where the gaps in the market were present.
We looked into all of our competitors including industry giants and smaller businesses, to see where and what keywords they were currently ranking for and what opportunities we can take to make sure we are covering everything In order to compete at a high level. However, we also took this one step further and looked into what our competitors were not ranking well for and how we can optimise and rank for these sets of keywords, allowing us to be visible where our competitors were not currently.
After identifying over 1,000 keywords which we would like to target, we narrowed down our priorities and those keywords which we believe will generate high quality conversions. This included keywords such as ‘luxury’ , high search volume and also important segments which our client communicated to us.
These keywords in particular were the most competitive with huge competitors such as TUI, TrailFinders and Last Minute.com which makes this task a lot more difficult to rank alongside these businesses. So here we had to manage clients expectations and discover niche competitors who were still ranking above us but we believed we could outrank with our expertise and bespoke optimisations.
Implementation.
Once the keyword sitemap was built and agreed, we then implemented our optimised page title tag, page H1 and meta description changes, propelling an early and essential surge once acknowledged by Google. Within the keyword sitemap we also suggested creating over 30 new pages for the site in order to effectively target a variety of different segments. As part of this process, we worked with development and the internal team to create the new pages with a bespoke filtering system for each type of package holiday and also created on-page content in order to house our keywords.
Alongside this, we conducted monthly technical audits and started to create a link building strategy, building back links from high domain authority publishers which are relevant to the travel industry.
Further down the line, we are now looking at ways we can optimise the current blog content and to also build out a long term blog content calendar in order to target long-tail keyword research within the travel industry.
I would like to state below the biggest keyword increases we have seen for important targets:
We are also ranking within the top 10 positions for keywords with over 18,000 searches a month.
We saw a 131% increase in contact forms during the time we have been working together, compared to the previous period.
We have also seen the quality of the inquiries improve since we updated the contact form to provide Arctic with as much information as possible, so they are able to quote most effectively and we also stated the minimum budgets per booking which we feel has helped.
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