SEO case study: the power of onpage seo

Ok guys- here's one of my pay it forward moments.. Im gonna share a recent seo ranking success story.
A client recently contacted us to rank for a hotel in Laguna Beach, CA.
crescentbayinn.com
Their site isn't exactly a showpiece. They don't have many customers, partly because they didn't have ANY ranking whatsoever. We agreed to help them rank for a long term kw and then after that, go for the gold. Its always better to get a top or page one ranking first and build trust around that with google rather than go for a very competitive term.

The kw phrase we targeted was: laguna beach economical hotel

The result: we got them to page one in less than 2 weeks.

How? A) onpage seo B) some MINOR inbound links
Thats IT. AND we got to page 2 without even doing the links....

And my suggestion to anyone doing seo: ALWAYS do your onpage tweaks FIRST. Why?
Because the spiders will crawl your page once you make your changes and note the good seo, whereas if you do links first and the SE's note your missing seo factors, you gain nothing.

Needless to say the hotel marketing manager is ECSTATIC about their high ranking and has referred us 3 new clients as well.

 

Thanks for nice experience sharing with us we always look this matter

 

what is the competition for these keywords?

 

Great job! But do you think they'll be disappointed at the lack of traffic/bookings they'll get or are they even tracking traffic? Not many people tend to search for "economical hotels" but rather "cheap hotels" or "discount hotels." It's like optimizing for "fashionable hotels" rather than "luxury hotels." However, I do understand that the website is terrible to work with for SEO.

 

Yes, I'm afraid I have to agree with Sevnrock. While its great you've achieved a top 10 result in such a short space of time, you're ranking against an uncompetitive keyword that as far as I can tell has an extremely low search volume. For all the people that DO search that term, your client is still competing against sites like uptake.com and tripadvisor.com.

When a potential client comes to us the very first thing we'll do is establish the likelihood that a give keyword will provide financial benefit, whether in the long or short term. If the answer is no or by a negligible amount then we'd recommend another keyword that would.

 

The extent of off-site SEO one needs to do to rank high depends on the level of competition for the keyword phrase. Apparently, the keyword phrase you targeted is not highly competitive

 

Good point Crimonc. When a customer comes to us, we do a full audit of their site making sure that it is SEO friendly. If it's not, we don't even take a single cent from them unless they make the changes we recommend. It's to ensure that we provide higher returns and protect our reputation in the field.

Not trying to bust the OP's bubble by any means, but it makes me wonder if the hotel's marketing manager even knows what ROI is.

 

Sevnrock- go ahead and and take a shot-
The idea for ranking a new site or kw, at least with our experience is to get them some trust with google if they havent yet achieved that. Hence the longtail. The hotel marketing manager knows all too well what kws will drive traffic and ROI and what will not.
IMO if you try and go for the gold on say a kw with large competition, say 20m+, and cant show the client any short term progress, you stand to lose a client. Performance is what our clients like to see. ROI is important too, ultimately all that matters- and we have actually got them new business even with the phrase listed above. Im talking 15X times their spend with us- new business
We also did the same thing for 3 other clients with competition in the 1M range- took approx. 3 weeks. Did that to eventually go for their most profitable kw which is in the 35m area..which of course wont be as easy. Page one for that kw Im told generates around $3-5k net per day
Ultimately, KW volume alone doesn't dictate ROI.

 

And yeah their site sucks hard We want to do a cheap redesign but they literally cannot afford it. They had approx. 11 people staying there when we went in for a consult...they now have quite a bit more business and we are pushing for a new site hopefully by fall.

 

Great points...What would you say was the biggest onpage factor that enabled you to rank? Was it the title? Did you use header tags, new descrip/meta tags, as well as new content on the site? Perhaps if you ran through exactly what you did in terms of thought process and action it would be a more beneficial thread. Thanks

 

Did 'em all at the same time so cant really say which is the most important. Title IMO is prob numero uno. Meta's dont do much these days...aside from the serp description..which is best used for promotional marketing ie phone #, specials, coupon discount, etc

 

If you really want to put on-page elements in order, in my experience it's as follows:

- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- Number of internal links to that page using the keyword as anchor text
- Actual Keyword use in the content of the page

 

Nice. Yeah, I am happy to see this achievement generated more business for you guys (that's essentially how we work too).

I work for a big hospitality internet marketing company and do SEO for a lot of luxury hotels/resorts, let me know if you want to talk more about online marketing in the hospitality industry (one of our clients is coincidentally in Laguna Beach too .

 

Yeah -its tough because we are fulfilling our obligation to get them targeted traffic, to their site, but the site is going to struggle to bring them new clients. We've got them on page 3 for their
money kws, but they arent going to bank until they re-do their site, and then the hotel (lol).

They were spending over $800 a month on a yellow page ad which didn't bring them ANY clients. Its a tough gig for sure. And TBH the hotel really needs some upgrades. All these things don't help seo's get to the ultimate goal- more revenue for the client.

 

I agree with what OP said about on-page SEO, but what I don't get is why to choose such keywords with no search competition. The keyword BrianJump targeted "laguna beach economical hotel" has no searches/competition (in Adword Keyword Tool), so why would we choose such keywords that have <10 searches per month (globally)? Making a site authoritative is something that can ALSO be accomplished by selecting long-tail BUT less competitive keywords that brings some traffic (may be 500+ searches a month). But I don't see how traffic and conversion would improve for any website when there are no searches for keywords.

Let me know if I am missing something Brian.

 

Good points and I hear what you're saying-
A) what are you using to determine search vol? Often people use methods that don't define real search volume.
B) the client IS getting results ie traffic. Is it 1000's a per day? No. Is it more than you've estimated? Oh yeah.

 

A) I use Adwords Keyword Tool (as mentioned in my first post)
B) If client is getting traffic with that keyword, then can you please let us all know about what keyword tool you are using to finalize your keywords; Adwords, Discovery, or WordTracker?

Regards,

 

Biztrendz is right, you really need to be using Adwords Keyword tool to be getting an idea of whether a keyword is worth investment. Of course it doesn't work across the board - I have an oil drilling client and their keyword terms get less than 100 searches a month but their products cost upwards of $35million and they're very specialist, so it's about knowing the target audience.

 

I use several kw tools- I wouldn't want to seo for a client without having proper data As crimsonc says, volume alone means nothing. I just looked at the stats today and my client had 98 impressions yesterday, and 41 clicks to their site. Their local/places listing had 15 map direction clicks as well..
Remember- this client was spending $800 a MONTH with a wasted yellow page ad that resulted in ZERO bookings..yet they shelled out the money month after month due to a very crafty yellow page rep.

 

in fact before your site's new pagetitles and your links there was only one other site on the whole internet that could even vaguely be said to be "targeting" those words - see http://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle:laguna+beach+economical+hotel&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

although with an allintitle: of 95k its going to be a while before you get "laguna beach hotel" so I would have at least worked "budget" "cheap" "value" etc modifiers in there too.

I think you should probably wait a while yet before you start sharing your glories