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Search Engine Optimization Case Study
Expanding Keywords for an Online Travel Agency
10-Second Summary
My client, an online travel agency, needed to increase organic traffic despite having little existing SEO foundation and several large competitors. I increased their number of keywords in top 10 positions from 8 to 133 in less than a year by identifying unlikely keyword opportunities and weighing potential traffic.
The Challenge
My client, an online travel agency, was at a crossroads. For years, its digital strategy was based on attracting new travel advisors to their program, who would then promote their services on their own. As the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the travel industry, however, company leadership decided that their website would be put to better use by attracting prospective travelers directly, turning them into leads that their expansive team of advisors could field.
The Morey Creative team agreed with this approach and welcomed the opportunity to usher in this new era of their digital strategy. The problem? We would be starting practically from square one, as the site’s existing content strategy was intended to attract prospective advisors – not travelers.
Now, we’d be entering the ring with a number of household names such as Expedia and Tripadvisor.
The Solution
It was plain to see that making substantial SEO progress would take consistent content production driven by a targeted content plan. But seeing as we could not match their resources and lacked their existing industry authority, it would not be as simple as replicating whatever content our competitors were publishing and hoping for the best. Instead, we would need to be smarter and remember our goal: increase the flow of prospective travelers to the site so that they can be paired with a travel advisor. So, instead of going where our competitors were, we went where they had neglected.
Through comprehensive research using third party tools such as SEMrush, I compiled a collection of travel-intent keywords that were related to my client’s specialities, had viable search volumes, and had enticingly low estimated difficulties.
"So, instead of going where our competitors were, we went where they had neglected."
While the list lacked flashier keywords that my client might have coveted, they were not yet in a position for search engines to consider them a competitive resource. Instead, these terms could be captured with the length and frequency of content that was within our capabilities given the size of our team, and result in more traffic than if we had attempted to rank for more competitive terms.
I received buy-in from my client by highlighting potential traffic gains with respect to difficulty.
From observing estimated traffic data, I found that the portion of estimated search volume that a particular search result received based on its position in this industry went as follows:
| SERP Position | Portion of Estimated Search Volume |
| 1st | ~50% |
| 2nd | ~12% |
| 3rd | ~5% |
This observed decrease in traffic as position decreased meant that, assuming industry juggernauts would maintain hold of the first two positions for the immediate future, my client could generate more traffic by first targeting lower volume keywords with lower, more manageable difficulties.
For example, ranking first for a term with a volume of 200 would generate more traffic than ranking third for a term with a volume of 1,000.
The Results
What I created was a content plan consisting of 46 blog posts and three pillar pages across three topic clusters related to three destinations that enjoy consistent demand amongst my client’s target audience of North American travelers: the Caribbean, New York City, and Florida.
The pieces were written by my team of Inbound Content Developers at Morey and published on a weekly basis.
At the start of this strategy, my client’s website had eight travel-intent keywords ranking in top 10 positions. My client closed out that year with 133 travel-intent keywords in top 10 positions, and a pipeline full of travelers looking to book their next trip.
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Top 10 Keywords Before
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Top 10 Keywords After