We helped City Explorer dominate the tourism sector in Liverpool by outranking major competitors at 1st place for the highest volume tourism keyword – attracting new domestic & international customers.
In the modern era, consumers are increasingly more likely to turn to platforms like Google and Bing to find the answers to their questions. At Activate Digital, we are no stranger to the power of online search engines. We’ve provided SEO marketing for a long list of clients, including City Explorer, a sightseeing tour bus in our home city of Liverpool.
Continue reading to learn more about how we helped delivered organic success for City Explorer.
What Does City Explorer Do?
City Explorer is a sightseeing bus tour in Liverpool, providing one of the best options for discovering the city’s most iconic and engaging destinations for tourists. The bus visits everything from the Liverpool One complex to the Museums District and the city’s gorgeous cathedrals. City Explorer is an excellent way to see Liverpool for one great price – tourists don’t have to worry about loads of walking for hours or the hassle of multiple modes of transport.
City Explorer’s core feature is a hop-on, hop-off experience, allowing customers to board and disembark at 14 locations around Liverpool city centre. Recently, the client has expanded their service offerings with two new tours, a panoramic sightseeing tour and a Beatles Explorer Tour. The Beatles tour visits historic locations across Liverpool, including where the Fab Four grew up and the origins of famous songs such as Penny Lane and Strawberry Field. All tours come with a live guide on board providing insightful information and facts, complete with witty scouse humour.
A sightseeing tour requires effective marketing strategies that will position the brand in front of an international audience. We have a long history of working with City Explorer, including designing and developing a brand new website. Our team aimed for impactful imagery, bold design elements and a simple bookings process, making it easier than ever for people to plan ahead and secure a seat on the bus before they arrive in the city.
One of the long-term services that we provide for City Explorer is an ongoing SEO campaign. Having worked on the campaign for several years now, we’ve helped the client grow significantly with outstanding success.
How SEO Achieved Success for City Explorer
The SEO work we’ve conducted for City Explorer is part of a long-standing campaign that commenced by ensuring the client ranked for high-profile niche keywords relating to the brand and the services that they provide. In recent years, we explored ways of achieving further growth with a campaign expansion. We decided that the ideal way to expand would be to target more generic tourism terms. With a steady first-place position for specific keywords like ‘Liverpool tour bus’ and ‘hop on hop off Liverpool’, we focused on what people are likely to search before they arrive in the city for a holiday or day out.
Our research took us to things to do. Simply put, if you’re planning to visit somewhere, there’s a high chance that you will want to search for things to do in the city. To date, the ‘things to do in Liverpool’ keyword receives around 22,200 monthly searches – and that’s only UK volumes! It was clear that this phase is the most popular tourism word around, and it only takes a quick search to see how competitive it is. Several well-known brands, such as Trip Advisor, Visit Liverpool, Time Out, and the Liverpool Echo, rank on the first page and are clearly going for the keyword as a priority. With such high competition and no existing rankings for City Explorer, we had our work cut out.
To begin our plan, we created a pillar page that would focus on the keyword. We wanted to create an in-depth page for things to do in Liverpool, making it THE number one place for people searching for an answer to this query. We focused on updating the page with regular updates, providing tourists with helpful and interesting ideas, and building external links from relevant websites. What started as a blog post with a handful of ideas is now a dedicated page with 70+ suggestions of Liverpool’s best attractions!
Through our work, City Explorer now ranks at number one for ‘things to do in Liverpool’ and similar keywords, a position we’ve held for over 6 months. The keyword’s monthly search volumes indicated how successful the expansion would be if done right, but live data is what matters most. The results in Google Analytics are highly positive and show that the page is now the clear winner in terms of acquiring organic traffic for City Explorer, far more than any other page on the website. Not only are we providing valuable information to people, but we are informing more prospective customers about the brand, not just in the UK but from over 90 different countries – helping people plan before they visit. Beyond this, and most importantly, we achieved growth in online bookings. Even on the back of the coronavirus pandemic, a crisis that hit the tourism industry hard, the client is enjoying some of its most successful months.
SEO is an ongoing process, and even when you achieve first-place rankings, there is always room for expansion. That’s why we continue to develop the things to do guide by identifying new keywords that match the content and optimising it further for conversions. While some outdated businesses downplay the importance of SEO, we believe this campaign provides a clearcut idea of how, when done right, it is a service that can attract thousands of new customers.
Please visit our City Explorer case study to learn more about how we’ve helped this tourism client with extensive marketing support.
If you want to achieve SEO success like City Explorer, schedule a meeting with us today. Our SEO Liverpool team has delivered commercial growth for a wide range of clients across multiple industries. We can offer bespoke information and recommendations before agreeing to a commitment. Reach out to find out more about how we can support your business.