Journey to the incredible growth - Bluerank
& Rainbow
After a hard period of lockdown, the r.pl website is currently recording the best financial results in the history of the client, the client's business is back on the track. A long and tough road is behind us, but it was an amazing journey. A journey to the incredible growth!
Challenges
Large drops in traffic and sales after March '20
The coronavirus pandemic has had a negative impact on the entire travel industry - our client experienced large drops in traffic and revenue on the website
Huge difference in visibility to your competitors' sites
At the beginning of 2020, the r.pl website had 33 000 keywords less in the TOP10 than Tui.pl and 40 000 less than Itaka.pl (main competitors)
Blog content didn't participate in conversion funnels
Blog texts have not translated considerably into sales increase - the challenge was to boost content attribution in tour sales
Strategy
The strategy and its implementation began in Q4 19’. Some of the implemented activities are still being carried out. The main pillars of the strategy are as follows:
- Technical SEO
- Creating topic silos by blog content
- Blog content reoptimization
- Link building & outreach
- Informing and educating about the rules and procedures of travel to all destinations in client’s offer
Realization
Technical SEO
Googlebot had problems rendering pages because they are built mostly with the use of JavaScript technology. Optimizing JS scripts allowed Googlebot to render the pages better and to recognise content on the pages. We have implemented internal linking from the blog - we linked contextually to tour offers and destinations, e.g. Greece and a standardized, unique and SEO-optimized meta titles and meta descriptions.
Create topic silos by blog content
Using content, we supported the most popular destinations (Greece, Dominican Republic, Turkey). After the lockdown had started, we decided to create attractive content about leisure in Poland, as the domestic tourism wasn’t so much restricted. We supported the part of the client's business that could generate revenue.
After the outbreak of the pandemic, Rainbow residents located at the tour destinations were involved in creating high-quality content for the blog. They described local attractions, recommended restaurants and shared their knowledge about the facilities they were staying in.
Content reoptimization of the blog
When we started the SEO campaign, there was already substantial amount of content created on r.pl blog. We have used our own Rewrite tool for analyzing, optimizing and monetizing content. The tool has given us the possibility to navigate low hanging fruit, so we could focus on content re-optimization, which gives the measurable results faster.
Link building/outreach
Bluerank has created over a dozen travel blog rankings. Having created the rankings on the r.pl blog, we contacted their owners, notifying them that their site was included in our ranking. Over 60% of bloggers have linked an entry on their website to the ranking on the R.pl website. We have prepared a report on Poles traveling to Greece (the most popular destination among Polish people). We independently surveyed a group of over 1100 respondents. After sending press releases to the largest Polish publishers about the report, we obtained several dozen backlinks. The press releases with the backlink were published by top Polish travel websites.
Informing and educating about the rules and procedures of travel
We have created several dozen landing pages on traveling to various holiday destinations. All the information included there has been updated regularly on the basis of official information from government websites. The pages contained information on the required documents and the rules for entering the country. Pages became popular, acquiring thousands of organic sessions and appearing on conversion funnels.
We created a series of blog articles related to the coronavirus (quarantine after returning to Poland, EU Covid-19 Certificate, the rules of safe travelloing, Passenger Locator Form etc.). Articles generated multiple organic sessions a month.
For people traveling abroad, we created instructions on how to fill in the applications on the website of The European Digital Passenger Locator Form. The instructions generated a large number of organic sessions.
Results
+33 000 in TOP10 keyword visibility (over 700% grow)
Compared to the beginning of the 2020, the visibility of the website in TOP10 increased by over 33 000 keywords (almost 700%!).
+60% increase in the participation of the organic channel in all traffic (increasing the participation of organic traffic from about 23-24% percentage points to 38%)
Stabilizing client's business by increasing organic traffic on the R.pl website. The share of the organic channel grew over 60% (to 38 percentage points) despite increasing budgets for paid channels. The organic channel generates the most traffic on the website.
+2 000 000 more organic sessions year-over-year ‘21 vs ‘19 (over 20% growth)
The goal was to achieve at least 1,000,000 more sessions a year. Considering the timing of the pandemic, it was quite a challenge. We achieved over 2 000 000 more organic sessions (over 20% increase). There were 10.2 million organic sessions in 2019, and 12.3 million in 2021.
+45 000 000 PLN [10 000 000 EUR] revenue more year-over-year (over 38% growth)
2021 was still the time of the pandemic. Despite the difficult times, the organic channel revenue growth amounted to nearly PLN 45,000,000 [EUR 10,000,000]. In 2019, it was less than PLN 115 million, and in 2021, it was almost PLN 160 million.
+500 000 more organic sessions for coronavirus phrases related with traveling - informing and educating about travel rules and procedures to all destinations in offer
All coronavirus-related content has generated nearly 500 000 organic sessions. They have participated in conversion paths, and thus, completed one of the stages of Customer Journey. We achieved high positions for the keywords: "country + coronavirus" (e.g. "greece coronavirus", "Italy coronavirus", "Portugal coronavirus" etc.), all keywords related to quarantine and returning to Poland from holidays abroad. The instructions for filling in the forms ranked the keywords associated with phrases such as "passenger locator form + kraj" (eg. "eu digital passenger locator form Włochy", "eu plf Italy" etc.).
Awards
Performance Marketing Diamonds 2022
main prize in the category The integrated campaign of the year
References
Michał Jaworski, E-commerce, Marketing and Omnichannel Director at Rainbow Tours
SEO has always been an essential element of Rainbow's marketing strategy. For several years after changing the website engine and domain, we had great difficulties in rebuilding the visibility in natural search results that would reflect the company's position in the market. Close, partnership and open cooperation with Bluerank allowed us to discover new potential and move the r.pl website to the role of one of the leaders in the travel category. It is especially worth emphasizing that the majority of activities that allowed us to achieve these above-average results were carried out with the support of the Bluerank team in such a difficult for the tourism industry pandemic time.