Roma
Experience
How we helped Roma Experience increase organic traffic by 2,800% and get national news coverage.
Roma
Roma Experience are a specialist in tours of Rome who contacted us after a variety of bad experiences with SEO agencies. Their source of clients was very reliant on third party websites and affiliates and they wanted to attract more people through search. As leaders in the field who offer a unique product, they felt they deserved to be much more prominent in Google to reflect that.
“I’d highly recommend Tom and the SEO Travel team for anyone who likes open and honest insight into where they need to improve their digital marketing, and a team that can then implement it and get great results”
Davide Bolognesi
Page 1 rankings for variety of key phrases including ‘rome tours’, ‘palatine hill’, and ‘underground colosseum tour’
One piece of content we produced attracted more than 30,000 visits to that page alone in 2018
More than 50 pieces of coverage through PR work
National news coverage and features on top-tier travel publications including Lonely Planet, The Telegraph and Robb Report.
Traffic from search engines is up nearly 3,000% compared to the first month of the campaign and consistently hitting all-time highs
Challenges
When Roma Experience came on board they had been working with a poor quality agency who had been using links from their own network which were immediately taken down when they stopped working with them. This naturally brought a drop in performance, so it was important for Davide and the team to be on board with our approach through a turbulent first few months as rankings fluctuated.
The site was also built on Squarespace which brought with it limitations and some technical issues that couldn’t be resolved in the short term. We had to work around this in the early stages of the campaign and focus our efforts in other areas which were feasible and affordable for the client.
Fortunately, the Roma Experience team could see the value in our approach and the need for a long-term perspective to correct the issues the site and link profile had before coming out the other side to see sustainable, consistent results.
Services Included
Website Build
Technical SEO
PR
Link Building
Content Writing
What We Did
Given the historical issues with link profile and the inhibitions of the site from a technical perspective, our initial focus was on link building and content production. These were two things the client could benefit from and implement without too much additional spend which was an important factor early in the campaign.
After some fluctuation in the first few months as the work from the previous agency disappeared we started to see some more consistent ranking improvement that we could build on as the link building process took hold.
The site’s content was initially very focused on commercial terms, so we started to work on more informational pages targeted at the things people would be visiting Rome to see. This also started bearing fruit and bringing a lot more people to the site on a more consistent basis.
As this work started to bear fruit the client was able to reinvest in the site and we moved the site to WordPress to overcome the technical issues we had been facing from being on Squarespace.
We also started our PR activity with the goal of gaining more links in national news and top-tier travel consumer and trade publications to build on the foundations from our other link building work.
Results
We’ve made fantastic progress with the Roma Experience site since we started work and have seen performance go from strength to strength.
Organic traffic made excellent steps forward as the link building and content work took effect initially, and has since exploded after we were able to implement the technical on-site recommendations and started the PR work.
We now rank on page 1 of Google for a wide variety of highly competitive and well searched-for terms, and a mix of informational and commercial phrases which gives the site a very stable grounding without too much reliance on any one page or phrase.
The PR work has yielded some incredible coverage with coverage and links on the Telegraph, Robb Report, Lonely Planet and a whole host of other hugely powerful domains. These links have had a huge impact on SEO performance, along with the natural benefits of brand awareness and visibility that good PR brings.
The Roma Experience team has also grown as a result and saw a record year of sales in 2018.
More from the Client:
“Ever since we started with SEO Travel they have been open and transparent about the work they are doing and the reasons they are doing things. When we started we came from another SEO company doing things badly and at first our results dipped as the old company removed all the work they had done without us knowing. But we trusted Tom and followed his advice through the difficult start and then started to see things turn around with rankings improving and traffic starting to pick up. Only this time it was in a sustainable way as we were getting those results by doing the right things, instead of trying to ‘beat the system’.
As we continued this improvement we invested more in our marketing and were able to do more content production and start PR activity which has helped accelerate our progress even further with incredible growth in organic traffic and improved positioning for our key commercial phrases in Google.
I’d highly recommend Tom and the SEO Travel team for anyone who likes open and honest insight into where they need to improve their digital marketing, and a team that can then implement it and get great results.”
Davide Bolognesi – CEM, Roma Experience
Summary
Having started on a small budget and with very focused activity, we’ve managed to take small steps with Roma Experience that have cumulatively built into massive progress. Getting the basics right first allowed us to make progress initially, and as time has gone on we have been able to do more from them that has helped hit new heights almost every month that passes by. They are now one of the most visible specialist operators in the market.
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