Winner 'Best use of SEO' - Travolution Awards

Last night we won The Travolution Awards in the category ‘Best use of SEO’ for our campaign with Kuoni Travel.

Kuoni is the leading luxury tour operator in the UK, they have been voted “World’s Leading Tour Operator” at the World Travel Awards eleven times in a row.

The challenge was to implement an innovative SEO strategy that enhanced their brand online as well as delivered excellent results.

Key strategies:
- i-Travel – an innovative travel resource that enhances internal linking and act as link bait
- Searcher Profiles – understanding Kuoni’s demographic profile (Social Climber, Post Modern and Upper Liberal) and what differs when they research and book travel online
- Destination Strategy – making sure we optimized each destination ahead of the search spikes that occur due to seasonality
- Tiered Keyword Strategy – by categorizing and prioritizing our ‘KPI’ keywords we made sure we had the right focus throughout the campaign
- Universal Search – proliferating videos which gained universal search listings for generic and brand keywords
- Creation of YouTube Channel
- Extensive External Optimization including Social Media Releases – using online press releases with embedded videos
- PPC & SEO Synergy – aligning both channels, utilizing synergy to maximize results

The results:
- Increase in #1 rankings for Tier 1 keywords by 100%
- Organic traffic increase of 104%
- Organic share of visits increased from 37.95% in Sep 08 to 46.98% in May 09
- Organic share of visits increased by 24%
- Excellent ROI

Kuoni.co.uk received 64.6% more organic traffic in May 2009 than total search engine traffic in May 2008.

The awards process was a bit unusual, in addition to the standard written entry we had to pitch to a panel of judges.

The Travolution judges comments: “A fantastic demonstration of when SEO and user experience work hand-in-hand to create a powerful new proposition, especially with Kuoni’s new i-Travel proposition. The agency met all the client’s objectives and produced premium results with a clear return-of-investment.”