104%+ Increase in Local Search Traffic

A Marketing Story by Rock The Rankings about Sourced Adventures

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Sourced Adventures

Increase Sales

Challenge

Sourced Adventure’s mission is to make the outdoors accessible and affordable for everyone by providing round-trip transportation and offering a plethora of trips for every season, all at a low cost, our tours allow any adventurer the opportunity to escape the city for the day, weekend, or week. Being a top provider country-wide for snow busses, snow tubing adventures, and river tubing Sourced Adventures is a prime example of a company that can target local search queries to drive more organic traffic. On top of this, with multiple locations country-wide and Google My Business accounts set up without optimization behind them, there was a ton of opportunity here to help drive more traffic from local searches.

Solution

At the end of this campaign, there was one difficult barrier standing in the way: Google Search traffic was down across the board roughly between 30-40%+ for primary target keywords due to warmer temperatures that swept the East Coast. This was felt both industry-wide, as well as at Sourced Adventures. We confirmed this drop in the data by mapping Google Trends data against previous years and current organic traffic metrics. Users were simply searching less for winter adventures, including skiing, snowboarding and snow busses due to the abnormally warmer weather conditions (hello, global warming). It was clear that we needed to be capturing as many of those users who were searching our target keywords, as there were a lot fewer customers to go after this season when it came to organic traffic. Nonetheless, with the help of driving new users through organic search traffic with the help of Local SEO, we were able to combat this weather-affected traffic drop and still drive impressive results for the season. Let’s dive into exactly what we did to increase local search traffic: Keyword Research Each of these different locations hits on the same types of activities, so it was important to understand for each location which keywords users were searching for to find our listing. Not only is it important to know which keywords were being searched for in the past, but it was also important that we take these keywords and build-out local landing pages to target each of these cities along with those keywords (more on this later). To get started, we headed on over to Google My Business, and dove right into the “Insights” tab, which shows queries users have searched for to find our business: With these queries in mind from an already established GMB profile that was driving some traffic, we had a good idea which were relevant and which we should be building on to our local lander. GMB Optimizations It’s crucial that you optimize your profile, and fill it in its entirety with as much quality information about your business as you can. In this case, we were targeting the incorrect primary category, and there were no secondary categories defined as well. This was causing our overall reach to be much lower than it could be. On top of category selection, we also filled out the profiles in their entirety, adding keyword-rich content to the business descriptions. We also made a big push for collecting reviews across these accounts, as reviews bring unique content and keywords that also help to rank GMB profiles higher in the map pack. With a review collection strategy in place, and with the help of the Sourced Adventures team, we were able to bring in some impressive results in a short period of time: 30+ new customer reviews with 70%+ of those reviews being 5-star reviews. These guys provide an excellent service, and customers know that, so collecting high-quality reviews to promote on-site on our local landing pages was not an issue. Local Landing Pages & On-Page SEO The goal here was to create landing pages for each Google My Business location to help push these listings up in local queries into the three-pack, and to also help these pages rank in the national results. We focused these efforts on creating new pages that hit on the following key areas: An optimized URL structure The right primary keyword usage on-page Mobile-friendliness Google Map embed for your location Google My Business reviews embed Unique hyperlocal content about the location and services NAP (name, address, phone number) and hours We’ve implemented the exact same tactics throughout this case, as we’ve outlined in our how to rank higher in Google maps post. Local Citation Building Local citations are the online listing of a business including the name, address and phone number (NAP). You can think of this as essentially being the online version of a phone book. Examples of local citations are sites that you’re already probably familiar with, such as Trip Advisor, Yelp, Better Business Bureau and so on. These citations show Google that you’re a real business, and build your authority in the eyes of Google. Not only do you need to create new citations, but you also need to ensure that existing citations name, address and phone number match 100% as what is on your local landing page, as well as on your Google My Business profile. The three-step process looks as follows: Clean-up existing citations for NAP consistency Discover new citations opportunities Build new local citations At the start, we had only 1-2 citations for each location. We built out over 50+ citations for each location using both large, authoritative directories as well as niche directories within the travel space.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Results

Again, due to seasonality in the travel industry, we want to take a look at the results and break them down in comparison due to the previous year. This Local SEO campaign delivered quite some results in spite of the lack of search volume occurring this season: The primary target location, and longest established, saw solid gains with a 59% increase in visits on the website versus the previous year. Our secondary location achieved a 689% increase in website visits versus the previous period, and 2183% increase in driving directions versus the same period of the previous year. The third location on the East Coast also performed quite well with these optimizations in place: An overall 1143% increase in website visits, and 186% increase in total phone calls versus the previous year. Across all locations, we saw the following growth in local search traffic: 104% increase in website visits 16% increase in phone calls 137% increase in driving directions And a 246% increase in overall visibility in the local results