Case Study: How we grew website traffic by 10,000% in 8 months

There were days when websites didn’t play an essential role in generating business for travel companies. The website was just a source of information for services and products.

Tourists had to land directly at the physical location and search and compare travel agencies and trekking guides. This is time-consuming, and you have to get disappointed most of the time.

Staying at unmanaged hotels became a compulsion for tourists. Due to this, they loathe coming back again, and also they would never suggest it to others in their circle. So to avoid these types of unexpected various travel agencies started giving information online.

In today’s era, there is competition between travel agencies to get on top of the search engine to have more organic visitors to their websites. Whenever they gain organic visitors, they convert them into sales and leads through various services and ad copy techniques. 

Why is SEO important on a Website?

SEO analysis is done before SEO optimization. Without analyzing the website, it’s difficult to step forward for optimization.

SEO analysis is important to get a better understanding of the situation of the website. So, the strategy and plan can be made accordingly. Then, the SEO Audit is done to improve the website’s ranking.

This article provides a clear view of how we performed SEO analysis on travel and tour websites to improve their ranking on SERP. We successfully achieved the website’s visibility on the first page of Google. Previously the website was getting only 5-8 visits per day.

After working on the website, we successfully gathered nearly 1000 visitors daily. It took us nearly 7-8 months to increase the organic traffic.

Also, we ranked more than 150 keywords on Google’s first page. Some ranked keywords were Place to Visit in Nepal, Visit Nepal 2020, amazing mount Everest facts, etc.

You might think 8 months is too long, but we all know that SEO takes time. The most challenging task is time-consuming link building.

The website can negatively impact if particular care is not taken while building links. After working on On-page analysis, we built backlinks by analyzing our competitors’ sites.

Why is SEO analysis needed for a Travel agency’s website?

The website is accessed in every part of the world. So, it’s an excellent platform for a travel agency to make a website and grow the business worldwide since the tourists or trekkers can be domestic and foreign.

Thus Website can be a great marketing strategy for a travel agency. But without SEO, the website can be useless.

People like to go on Vacation for enjoyment and adventure experience. But they got confused about where to stay, the trekking guide, facilities, security, etc. So, the final way to approach this is the query on the internet. People will search for it on the internet and make the analysis.

How SEO benefits the Travel agency?

If the travel agency ranks first on the search engine result page, people will obviously visit that site. Visitors will get information about the place and services the agency provides whenever they come to the website. Then the travel agency can convert that visitor into lead and sales.

Let’s calculate it. For example, visiting Mt. Everest costs $1000 per person. If your website is getting 1000 organic visits per day, then, Of course, 2 – 5 percent will inquire about direct contact or any other means.

Then, the Travel agency can convert them into a sale. The trekking is done in a group of people. Let’s say the group consists of 5 people. Then the benefits will be $5000 per team, and for the month, the benefit can go up to $1000000.

How we approached the Website?

We looked at the website of the travel agency. SEO aside, the website was in poor condition. The website was not accessible.

The theme used on the website was not in perfect condition. It was not built professionally. The developer hadn’t invested valuable time in building the website.

So, We asked our web developer to make customization the website. The dev team applied the travel and tour theme on the website. Also, the developer built the necessary pages and designed them properly.

Due to our developer team, we achieved the maximum Utime of the website. We also asked our graphic designer to work on the website so that the graphics could have the best and most optimized images.

After the website development was finished, the website was handed over to our SEO experts.

Technical SEO optimization

Before working on any other SEO analysis, We worked on the technical part of SEO. We worked to get the website ready since the website was new. So, We worked on the following technical parts of the website.

Improved Speed of website

Speed of the website is necessary to increase user interaction and reduce the waiting period. If the website is slow, it is evident that online money transaction gets affected.

Also, reservation is real-time booking, and several people can make reservations simultaneously. If the website is slow, the web server can get hung, which is not a good practice. If the website is not optimized correctly, then the server can have internal server errors that can harm the SEO of the website.

We all know that Google started taking the website’s speed as the significant SEO factor. We checked the website on Gtmetrix and Google page insight and found the speed was poor.

So, We optimize the speed of the website. We initially worked with cache and minification and updated the website technologies.

Images were not correctly optimized. Therefore, with a tiny png website, we optimize the size of every image present.

Worked on device Responsibility for the website

The responsibility of a website was necessary because visitors can be from any device. So, We preferred a responsive WordPress theme to be loaded on every device such as tablets, mobile, laptops, etc. We checked the theme’s responsiveness through various devices and finally adopted it.

HTTPS setup

HTTPS makes a website secure and is one of the SEO factors, so we installed an SSL certificate. We also secure our admin panel HTTPS and redirect every URL to HTTPS. Also, we checked the mixing of HTTP and HTTPS for media and other attached files and solved the problem.

Improve .htaccess, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt files.

We generated the sitemap.xml file. The generation of sitemap.xml was necessary so search engine robots could crawl the website.

We included the sitemap.xml link on the robots.txt files. Optimization of the Robots.txt was done successfully so that Search engine spiders don’t access some restricted pages.

We used a .htaccess file to improve the speed of the website. Also, we used it for redirection purposes and blocking spam bot traffic.

SEO Audit through Google Search Console

After working on HTTPS setup, Speed, and Device responsibility, we moved toward the Google Search webmaster tool. We submitted the website to the Google Search console. Also, I submitted the sitemap.xml and checked the robots.txt through the search console.

After submitting the sitemap.xml to the Google Search Console, I submitted different website URLs to get them indexed. Also, we checked the live version of the website to ensure that everything, such as indexability, AMP version, etc., was okay.

Working on On-Page SEO analysis

After completing the technical SEO analysis, we checked the site for On-page optimization and found that the meta tags were not good.

Also, there was shallow content which was not good for the SEO. We used various premium tools to determine what was lagging on the site. Along with the suggestions from the premium tool, We also worked on SEO ranking factors.

Keyword Research

We worked with keyword research. We worked out the keyword difficulty, LSI keywords, etc. Also, we analyzed the competitors’ websites to ensure the efficiency of the keyword.

We used the premium version of the Semrush SEO tool to get ideas about the keyword. Firstly, we list the various keywords and select certain ones.

Meta tags Optimizations

Then, we optimized meta tags such as title, description, etc. We included the selected keywords in the title and meta descriptions. We used Copywriting techniques to write meta tags to make it effective.

Also, we included keywords in the image’s alt tag to grab organic traffic through the image.

Content Writing

Content is the king of any website. So, we started working on content. We wrote SEO-optimized content for the website. We included keywords in the content by doing keyword research and optimizing the title and meta description with a keyword.

Also, we conversationally optimized the content to increase user engagement on the website. Similarly, we checked the content for plagiarism to avoid penalties and finalize every piece of content by formatting it and making it free from grammatical errors before publishing it.

Backlink building

Last, Backlink building is the most important among all SEO optimizations. We started working on building backlinks.

Using Ahrefs tools, we analyzed the competitors’ backlinks and, accordingly, required the backlink from those domains. We pay special attention to link quality and link relevance. We also performed a guest post to grab the inbound link.

Before building backlinks, we were aware of link velocity, link farm, link juice, linkbait, etc., so we don’t prefer such practices that harm the site.

We found some spammy backlinks that point to our website. So, we used the disavow tool to tell Google search engine robots not to access those links while ranking our site.

Problem Faced during Backlink Building

While carrying out the backlink building, We found that some backlinks were spammy. These links were deteriorating the ranking of the website.

So, We decided to use the disavow tool to tell the Google search bot about the spammy links so that while ranking the website, the bot will not access those links. 

Conclusion

After working on the website, we keep an eye on its performance of the website. We look at the analytics for understanding visitors. Analytics gives a clear view of your visitors so we would know if further improvements can be made. Here are the reports we analyzed from Google Analytics:

The above analytics image shows the information before beginning the SEO analysis. As we can see, in the beginning, there were only 9 visitors per day in April.

At the end of April, We successfully achieved 40 visitors per day. The number is still going on.

Here you can see the peak traffic was on November 12. It means the ranking of the keywords is still going on.

 

In the above image, the report shows how traffic is gained. 88.16% of traffic is obtained from Search engines which will further improve the website’s ranking on SERP.

SEO is an ongoing process. The more you optimize your website, the higher its ranking on the search engine result page. It needs more work on the site. Special care should be given while building backlinks.

If referral traffics are from spammy websites, it can harm your website ranking too. Removing broken links and strings from the website URLs is good practice to keep your website clean and safe.

In this way, we successfully improved the website’s rank and ranked different keywords on the first page of SERP.

Start SEO analysis from today.

Do you own a travel and tour business? Are you frustrated by fewer visitors to your website?

It’s normal to get fewer visitors after launching the website. But if you don’t continue performing the SEO, then there is no chance you can increase the traffic.

Simply, you can increase traffic through promotion and social media, but converting them into sales would be difficult since referral traffic is just for business. You need organic traffic from search engines.

Furthermore, it would be better to target keyword ranking worldwide because tourists can be from anywhere.

We have provided a gateway to SEO analysis in the article. We hope you, too, get a higher ranking on SERP.

If you encounter any problem while performing keyword research and SEO analysis, we are ready to help you rank your website. After all, we are here to grow your business and generate more leads.

Just ping us by filling out the form below, and we will approach you with our plan and strategy to increase the rank of your website on the search engine result page.