Adventure
Alternative
How we helped Adventure Alternative increase bookings by 40% with a 120% increase in organic traffic
Adventure
Adventure Alternative run expeditions around the world including trips to the jungle, mountains, desert and arctic. The company was started by Gavin Bate who has scaled Everest many times and continues to run expeditions, and they have also set up charities to help local companies in many of the destinations they visit.
“If you’ve ever thought (as I did for a long time) – “I’ll do all that websitey stuff later and work it out myself” – then give SEO Travel a go for a few months just as a trial. I think you’ll be happily surprised”
Gavin Bate
Organic traffic is up 120% after 12 months work
40% increase in enquiries and 20% increase in bookings
The site has reached the top 5 of Google for key competitive terms such as ‘Everest base camp’, ‘mount Kenya’ and other extremely competitive phrases.
The site is found through 112% more phrases compared to the first month of the campaign
Significant increase in bookings for areas targeted with SEO work
Challenges
When we first spoke with Gavin he was skeptical of the value of SEO having been burned in the past and so one of our first jobs was to put his mind at ease that what we would be doing would provide value for him.
This is often the case with clients who have had bad experiences, so we do our best to hold hands as much as possible early in campaigns so the reasons behind everything we do are clear.
The Adventure Alternative site had some excellent links already established from press Gavin had gained from his amazing work and achievements, so the focus was more on fixing the technical issues on the site rather than off-site work.
Services Included
Technical SEO
Content Marketing
Link Building
What We Did
We started the campaign with a thorough technical analysis of the site to highlight where there were key issues so we could prioritise those that would have the biggest impact.
The site was suffering from a mixture of indexation issues, poor internal linking and content not being found as efficiently as it should have been.
We worked with Gavin to chip away at these over time to allow for the development costs involved, and steadily started to see improvement once the changes were crawled.
We then moved our focus to the on-page targeting of key pages and started to work through these, guided by Gavin as to which were most important to him from a commercial perspective.
Alongside this we also carried out some link building and content marketing work to keep developing the link profile and gain some fresher off-site signals to show the site was still a popular place to be.
Results
We started to see some good results once the first technical changes were put in place, but as these were given time to bed in things continued to get better and better.
Traffic to pages throughout the site improved as more of Gavin’s content became better linked to and was indexed more efficiently, and we then started to see big jumps for some of the most competitive phrases in the industry, like ‘everest base camp trek’ and ‘trekking atlas mountains’.
This trend continued and we have seen prolonged growth throughout the campaign as all pages benefit from the improved structure and technical fixes that have been put in place.
Gavin has reported that on average enquiries have jumped around 40% since last year, with bookings up 20%. However, this number is much higher for the specific trips that have seen improvement through the SEO work, such as trips to Mount Kenya.
More from the Client:
“If you’re like me and have spent years, decades even, developing your company brand through dedication to personal service and providing quality trips and holidays, then you’ll probably also empathise with the frustration I feel that nowadays that just isn’t enough. To be ‘found’ you need to play the game of search engine optimisation, and it costs money and takes skill. Pre-internet I advertised by meeting people in walking clubs and putting adverts in magazines and giving talks in village halls, it was word of mouth and reputation and it was also fun. Nowadays you need to understand the technical world of SEO and how Google ‘reads’ your site with spiders and converts your passion into an algorithm that either ranks you up or down. It’s knowledge that I never thought I’d need when I started my company back in 1991!
SEO Travel has to tread a line between treating every site as a set of data to be analysed, and managing the expectations of clients who see their site as almost an extension of their personality! Certainly for small business owners like myself, for whom the company is salary, pension and security for many staff and families, it’s a hard act to pull off. But Tom and the team seem to have the knack for being personable, down to earth and understandable, and also very good techie boffins (sorry, guys).
Whenever they advise me on a particular page and we do the work they tell us to – there’s something of the “must do our homework” feel to it – it’s really quite remarkable how in the following weeks we suddenly get more enquiries. There couldn’t be a clearer example of Doing This To Your Site = More Business.
Every month they search for new superlatives to describe the increase in percentage of unique visits compared to last month, last year and so on. For us it’s just a simple case of having to work harder with the increasing number of enquiries coming in every day. And the enquiries relate directly to the optimisation of the page that we’ve been told to improve. It reminds me of the old Ronseal advert – “it does what it says on the tin”.
I would say that in the last year since we’ve been using SEO Travel services, we started recovering that cost after three months in terms of additional profits. I compare that with the money I give to Google for my Adwords campaign, and there’s no comparison. Getting your site onto page 1 of Google organically is so much better than a Google ad at the top of a search page.
If you’ve ever thought (as I did for a long time) – “I’ll do all that websitey stuff later and work it out myself” – then give Tom and Pete a go for a few months just as a trial. I think you’ll be happily surprised.”
Gavin Bate – Founder, Adventure Alternative
Summary
This project proves the power of technical SEO. Gavin already had lots of fantastic content and just arranging that in a better way and improving targeting has made a huge difference. It highlights the importance of keyword research too, as often people write lots of content but don’t target it correctly. Stop wasting your time writing off the cuff and do some research. Gavin did with our help and is reaping the rewards.
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