Five tour keywords from nowhere onto page one

The problem

The paid account was being rebuilt at the same time, which made the organic gap obvious: every booking was being bought. For the searches that matter most to a tour operator, the site was not in the results at all.

The brief was to be visible for the tours actually sold, on mobile as well as desktop, and to turn that visibility into bookings rather than traffic.

What we changed

Keyword research came first and it went long-tail deliberately. Competing head-on for "Cape Town tours" from a standing start is a way to spend a year and rank for nothing, so the work started on the specific tours people search by name.

About twenty terms were identified across product, brand, map and country-level local searches. From there the work was ordinary and unglamorous.

• Site structure refined so the tours were reachable and grouped sensibly
• Technical audit and fixes, with mobile treated as the primary case
• Blog posts answering the questions visitors ask before booking, each with a clear next step
• Target terms worked into existing content rather than new pages spun up for each
• Internal links built from the site pages with the most authority into the tour pages
• Link building, and promotion of published pieces across social channels

What happened

Within a month the selected keywords had moved into the top ten on both mobile and desktop. Penguin tours Cape Town and Cape of Good Hope private tour both reached position two. Tours from Cape Town reached seven and Cape Town tours reached nine, both against high competition.

What we cannot show you is the traffic curve. The organic record from that campaign is a keyword position table, and the analytics behind it is not something we still hold in a form we can publish. Rankings without the sessions they produced are half a story, so treat this as the half it is.