SEO case study background
Everyone knows Alton Towers. Most people have been numerous times through the years. The UK’s premier theme park has been providing thrill and spills for children and adults for the last 30 years. However the theme park is now a fully-fledged resort with two hotels, a spa and other facilities that make it an extremely attractive destination for weekend stays and the corporate market too.
Strategy & implementation
“Having worked with fuse8 on previous SEO campaign for different parts of the Parks business, we were very confident that they would be able to deliver us the success we needed on what was a very challenging brief in what is a difficult sector at present. We are delighted with the results they were able to achieve and indeed continue to deliver via the organic search work and look forward to working even further with the wider fuse8 team on more creative and business-driven brief in the near future.”
Keyword research
Through the research work of dissecting the keyword demand around the terms for this season campaigns, we learned which short-tail and long-tail terms and phrases the customers require and that we needed to target with SEO. We used a number of keyword research tools including Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator, Google Wonder Wheel, Google Predictive Search, Clusty, Wordtracker, Google Insight for Search and more to brainstorm keywords and evaluate their quality.
Leveraging the long tail of keyword demand
To source long tail terms we analysed the pages that did well for searches that were relevant to our campaign and extracted information from them. We lifted the most common search phrases at the head of the table from our existing keyword research. Then we searched Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for each term and for each page in the top 10 results, extracted the unique usable text on the page, filtering out the instances of terms/phrases already in our keyword search list. Once the satisfactory keyword list was distilled, we began to construct the information architecture of each page.
Landing page optimization and keyword targeting
Using semantic mark-up and heading hierarchy we composed a mock up of every page, which expanded on every relevant terms/phrase. For example, the Pink Concert page contained brief sales message, detailed information about the concert, dates, prices, packages, information about the venue, Q&A’s, directions and, most importantly, calls to action. Every element of the page was optimized both for users and search engines. <title>, <meta> description, <meta> keywords, <h1,2,3,4… >. Special formatting tags were used strategically to enhance the significance of the targeted keywords on the page. Image file names, quality, contrast and alternative text were optimized to target the image search. Titles, meta and top content were written specifically to form compelling snippets for search engine results.
Link marketing
High quality information architecture and content are big requirements in achieving search engine visibility, but when it comes to mechanisms for ordering results, external links are the critical metric. A successful link building campaign is always an effort and resources have been lined up priori to campaign initiation.
The types of link building used in this campaign include marketing content for link acquisition, writing articles for industry blogs, manual social media link creation, aggressive marketing and promotions to the large social media audience, spreading content via blogs, incentive-based link requests, giveaways in exchange for good quality features in online publications, direct link requests and, most importantly, offline relationship building with bloggers.
Results
The Pink concert section was promoted to the top of Google for all relevant and popular keywords. The page reached higher rank then the official Pink website and some online ticket giants like Ticket Master, World Ticket Shop and Get Me In. The concert was a sell-out by March 2010. 25,000 tickets sold online, including 1,000 VIP packages incorporating hotel stays marketed on the website. 15,000 extra names and addresses have been captured due to the online nature of the sales to add to existing database of 600,000 subscribers. Also large volume of traffic continued pouring to the website from the search engines post-sell; people were visiting the FAQ and further information to help planned their trip.
Group tickets sales are 6% ahead of budget - about 50,000 tickets ahead of last year, generating approximately £1,22 million pounds extra.
Conference bookings acquired from search results are up by xx% this year as a result of the optimisation work done on the section.
During these campaigns and as a result of additional social media efforts Alton Towers has been a trending topic on Twitter every evening and he Facebook fan base grew by nearly 50,000. According to measurement published by Syncapse the increased number of fans is worth an additional £4,26 million British pounds to the business. Alton Towers Resort Facebook fans are now worth £22.5 million British pounds. Increased email marketing database and Facebook fan base form a foundation of the upcoming sequel of competition-driven link bait campaigns
Overall site traffic driven by organic search engine marketing has constantly exceeded those generated previously by percentages in double figures., included amazing increases of 41%, 701% and 36% in February, March and April respectively.