Discover.

When we began working with Austravel, our search behaviour insight highlighted that users tend to use flight keywords rather than holiday terms when booking trips to Australia.  This was a substantial keyword market that Austravel was previously missing out on.  By switching the focus from holidays to flights, it would open up their website potential to capture 1,000 percent more search volume.

Our research also showed that Austravel already had a strong brand domain, which gave a great platform to build authority for Australia-related search terms and capture people who are still in the brand decision making process.

Conceive.

To enable the website to rank for flight terms, we set to work by looking at which SEO technical recommendations could be easily implemented by the in-house team and have the biggest impact.  These included recommendations on homepage titles tags, category and destination page titles, meta descriptions and content.

We also looked at on-page recommendations to capture opportunities that the site previously missed.  For example, optimising images on the site to rank for relevant Australia search terms and improving deep-linking for relevant destination keywords buried within the website content.

We used persona and search behaviour insight to develop a link development strategy to supplement the technical changes and secure links from authoritative sites about holidays and Australia.

Deliver.

We sent through the recommendations and worked with the in-house team to help implement them. 

The persona research directly fed into a series of features which were of interest to both the personas and authoritative travel sites. These covered topics such as what to expect in the different seasons, the differences between Australia and New Zealand and surviving long haul flights.

Prove.

Austravel stayed in position two for holidays to Australia, but as we predicted the search volumes for this keyword were much lower and traffic to the Austravel site through this search term reduced year on year by over a third. However, Austravel's traffic began to grow. In 10 months Austravel jumped from page two to position one for the term 'Flights to Australia' which had some fantastic results for the brand:

• Austravel saw a 104% growth in natural traffic
• There was a 287% year on year increase in visits for 'Flights to Australia'
• There was an increase in other flight-related keywords too, for example 'Flights to Sydney' rose from position 44 to 10
• Natural search now contributes to 73% of online revenue