The customer was looking to improve his visibility and bookings in the highly competitive Chalet rental market in Quebec. They rent out high-end properties in key destinations and needed a way to improve the traffic on the site and its revenues.
The site was solid but slow, an attribute we couldn’t change due to some limitations. We were therefore starting with a strike against us.
Like all its competitors, which were established years before, and had 10x more cottages for rent, our client had already deployed the geo-localized pages, such as Cottage for rent Laurentides. However, this wasn’t enough, they still needed more traffic, therefore they contracted us to improve the ranking on Google.
With a much slower and smaller site than the competition to work with, we faced an uphill battle.
In June of 2020, the marketplace was showing visibility of 1% for its top keywords. Our work increased its visibility on Google to 44% in 12 months.
This increase in visibility translated to an increase in traffic from 400 visits a day to 2000-2500 visits a day and impressions moved from 8000 to 30 000 per day.
The market was highly competitive and the customers’ competitors were very well established at the top of the search engine result page (SERP). To gain market share, we had to get creative and really understand people’s motivation when searching for a cottage to rent. In this case, we found our answer with elaborate keyword research.
After studying the search engine results (SERP) for many variations of “cottage for rent (name of region)”. We discovered that the younger generation was searching more around the life experiences, or cabin features than location. For example “Chalet with spa” or “Cottage allowing dogs” were really popular and presented low competition with high search volume, the holy grail of SEO…
Once we understood this, we implemented hundreds of experiential pages targeting specific keywords such as “Cottage with pool” to address that highlighted key experiences in the chalet areas. From September 2020 to December, the pages were introduced to the site and indexed by Google. The impact was felt right away and the traffic on the site increased significantly. As a result, this increase in traffic improved the authority of the site, which in return sent our region pages much higher.
Today we continue to chase long-tail traffic and are finally addressing the speed of the site.
We have the top position in sight and will not let go until we reach it.
