Virgin Holidays: Taking off everything!
January sales target exceeded through tactical SEO during
challenging market conditions
Background
Virgin Holidays operates in a competitive market but the
Autumn/Winter of 2009/10 was especially tough and promoting
long-haul destinations to a recession-weary public was proving a
challenge. The January sale, intended to be their biggest ever, was
supported by a high-profile above the line campaign with a
burlesque creative theme and the cheeky strapline 'We've taken off
everything we can.'
Driving holiday-seekers to virginholidays.co.uk during the
sale period was crucial. Steak has been successfully managing the
paid search campaign for two years, and having been appointed in
August 2009 to also handle search engine optimisation, was briefed
to fully integrate the search strategy to maximise ROI.
Steak had to deliver against a specified target for
transaction volume and value for the duration of the sale period.
Despite the challenges within the travel industry, the booking
volume target for this sale period was stretched to increase
considerably year-on-year.
Work
Steak's strategy was to build an overall long term
increase in natural search visibility around key searches, to stand
Virgin Holidays in good stead throughout the year, and deploy
tactical use of SEO to support short term objectives and
promotions, the first of which was the January sale.
By analysing paid search data Steak could see the typical
searches made before purchase and understand how a holiday-seeker
might review all options through different searches before making a
decision. Steak was then able to identify areas where Virgin
Holidays was performing well for paid search, but not for
natural.
A range of technical changes were implemented to make the
site more search engine friendly and improve performance (including
alterations to title and heading tags, and internal linking
structure). This was supplemented by a link-building process that
identified relevant travel sites and engaged with them to secure
inbound links.
Results
By the end of January, after just four months of work, the
year-on-year traffic volumes for non-brand natural search terms had
vastly increased - by 74%. Even with this additional traffic,
conversion levels were steady, proving that quality of traffic had
been maintained, and not diluted by expanding the
campaign.
The campaign successfully grew Virgin Holidays' visibility
on Google, delivering an increase of 75% for keywords in positions
1 and over 38% increase in keywords within the top 3
pages.
Overall, the SEO campaign delivered 168% of target sales
(16.8% growth YoY compared to a target of 10%) - against a backdrop
of one of the most competitive markets Virgin Holidays had ever
faced.
"Appointing one agency to manage both our paid and natural
search allowed us to be more nimble with developing both tactical
and long term strategies. We were also able to combine data not
only from our paid search activity, but to bolster this with our
own web analytics and customer demand analysis to truly establish
where to focus our efforts and activity. In addition, ensuring that
all onsite optimisation was supported with effective, targeted link
building techniques helped us to deliver such strong results in a
challenging environment and to lay down a comprehensive framework
for long term results. "
Claire Palmer , Web Acquisition Manager, Virgin
Holidays
