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At Equator, we don’t just adapt to the digital world’s constant evolution, we embrace it. Our passion is Digital transformation, and we always aim to be one step ahead.
While many business strategies are built on past results and trials, they often become inflexible. At Equator, we embrace change, leveraging our knowledge and skills to adapt and thrive in the dynamic digital world. This approach allows us to craft innovative strategies tailored to our and our clients’ objectives, setting them apart.
Our experience helped us to identify that a fixed approach will not always be appropriate for optimising resources and strategies. Therefore, we incorporate this knowledge by using an integrated approach to using our internal resources and channels to optimise time, blend knowledge and receive better results. This allows us to approach situations or challenges from a broader perspective and identify opportunities for growth.
Our unique approach has propelled us to the forefront of the travel, leisure, insurance, retail, and health industries, demonstrating our leadership and success.
Using innovation to compete in a competitive field
We are immensely proud to have been shortlisted for the Best Local SEO Campaign award. This recognition is a testament to our dedication and hard work in driving traffic and improving the performance of the Village Hotels explore directory, and it reassures our clients of our commitment to excellence. Village Hotels is a unique client as they have a chain of 33 hotels across the UK, so we must consider all Village locations and not one particular area like other hotel brands. This means we must tailor our marketing effort to consider the diverse range of people visiting a Village hotel. Fortunately, our full-funnel integrated strategy allowed us to make recommendations within 2023 with full on-page reviews, allowing us to identify areas of weakness within site and have a content overhaul. We managed to implement this over 15 locations with our goal of increasing visibility and monthly sessions to over 100 per page.
Our local SEO strategy helped boost this campaign to success
We worked closely with Village Hotels from August 2023 to identify that there was a need for a new SEO strategy to be implicated to increase visibility and ensure the content available was relevant and was updated according to the target market’s needs. As part of this strategy, we understood that we would have to complete a full analysis of our current vs target users and, from there, create a user story to help understand why our users are landing on these pages and the actions they should be taking after landing on the page. Combining these allowed us to provide a better customer experience to those landing on these pages and understand areas of the page which would need to be updated.
The campaign launched in August of 2023 and aimed to target business and leisure travellers primarily. Local residents looking for things to do in the areas were also considered when implementing our approach. We took on three pages a month to complete the content overhaul and on-page reviews. Each location was researched using keyword research and optimised to ensure each page was fleshed out with informative and relevant content. This content was specific to the local area, including different events and destinations with which our users would resonate. They were also broken down into particular categories (cultural, family, nightlife, etc) so that users would find this easy to navigate, and we could create content for a broader range of users.
This strategy succeeded in boosting the directory to reach qualified and relevant audiences. When combined with testing new CTAs, this campaign was propelled to success.
Our SEO strategy drove 54,385 sessions to qualified audiences
We utilised many SEO tools, which allowed us to extract phrases that were used to find each page historically and combine this with further topics created from our keyword research to build a content strategy for each page. Competitor research was also crucial in implementing this strategy; the data was primarily found on OTAs, allowing us to pinpoint the content we should focus on to receive a competitive edge within the organic search results. However, throughout this time, we ensure we do not lose sight of our primary objective of increasing revenue. Our internal team also reviews the metadata and content to confirm its relevance to the audience and usefulness, allowing them to be optimised when necessary.
Optimisation was necessary due to the limited budget, as we could not invest in additional activities such as outreach, social and digital PR push, which could have been valuable assets to boost our on-page efforts.
At Equator, we strive to challenge ourselves continuously to discover and test new strategies and build our skill set. This campaign was no different, as we set ambitious targets for increasing revenue and landing page sessions significantly. When we compare the data between 2022 and 2023, there is no mistaking that these positive changes have made a difference within the site and have allowed us to achieve our goals. Reviewing YoY performance, it is clear Equator successfully drove increased traffic to the Explore directory by 54,385 sessions per year, which showed an average increase of 232% in organic traffic for each page we reviewed. This also means that nearly every page updated for the new SEO strategy exceeded the original KIP of an additional 100 sessions per month. Each updated page increased by an average of 264 organic sessions per month, exceeding the original goal by 164% on average per location.
The significance for Equator
We are so grateful to be recognised for our work, primarily when we can deliver positive results and create a long-term strategy for our clients.
Our fabulous team of transformation experts collaborates to propel our clients’ businesses to new success. Using our unique and agile approach, we found personalised solutions for Village Hotels and achieved their goals.
It is a huge honour to be recognised by the European Search Awards for this nomination, and we are looking forward to congratulating our fellow nominees both within the best local campaign category and the other categories.
