Situation:
After establishing itself with paid search advertising and almost 3 years of consistent inbound marketing, the Cedar Creek Cabin Rentals website needed a boost. Traffic and leads had begun to slip downward. It was time to explore new ways to boost results, especially considering that almost 85% of the total rental cabin nights booked online. So it was imperative to keep online activity sharp.
With 13 years in this cabin rental business, owner Tom Telford wanted to focus on new marketing tactics to address slipping organic keyword rankings and stagnant social media presence.
Solution:
Our team met with Cedar Creek to come up with a new strategy. We collectively agreed on two different ideas: specific SEO work and Facebook promotion.
- The SEO website optimization tactics included schema.org site markup, some local site listings cleanup and citation work. We also focused on improving 2nd page keyword rankings via critical internal linking opportunities with related blog topics. This “keyword cleanup” employed blogging best practices to improve the site’s performance.
- We developed Facebook campaigns to capture motivated leads and convert them to customers. This also increased fan base and engagement. Two customized Facebook promo sweepstakes were launched (see image examples for the Mother’s Day and July 4 Holiday promotions). This also involved targeted Facebook advertising to capture more likes.
Results:
The Facebook tactics produced immediate results. There were 391 combined entries into the two sweepstakes. Facebook likes grew +690 as a result of the two promotions. Importantly, there was a 2.7 % conversion rate of non-winning entrants to paying customers who took advantage of the discount offer.
Facebook advertising steadily produced about 250 likes per month for Cedar Creek.
The SEO tactics helped generate major increases in target keyword rankings. This graph shows how the ranking increased over time for one particularly important keyword to Cedar Creek:
This very important keyword for Cedar Creek, responsible for lots of monthly searches and customer leads, moved up from the second page of search engines to #1 ranking. Just as it did for this critical keyword, the SEO work helped zoom rankings for dozens of other target keywords. Over time, this resulted in a dramatic upturn in organic website traffic:
Client Reaction:
Cedar Creek owner Tom was elated. His cabin rental business employs 55 people. He attributes increased business (revenue $$) year-over-year to specific inbound marketing tactics executed by 98toGo. In his words: “I’m very happy. My increased profits from these efforts are more than 3X higher than the cost of the marketing expenses charged by 98toGo. This proved to be a huge win for our company.”
Next Steps:
