Case Study: Travel Intelligence by Karen Durham-Diggins, 20 May 2008

The web has spawned many great ideas. But great ideas on their own do not create great online businesses. TravelIntelligence.com is a collective of some of the most popular travel writers in Europe and together they have created over 8000 pages of excellent travel writing. But not a single page was optimized and as a result, readership and the business returns it could create had fallen well short of potential. Enter a hard-nosed business brain and an experienced SEO, and things started to change.

Great oaks from little acorns grow - or even from a garden shed in Shepherds Bush, West London - which is where travelintelligence.com (TI) began in 1999. Created by a small group of professional travel writers including William Dalrymple, Rory Maclean, Andrew Eames and Philip Marsden - the company was led by founder and current editorial director James Dunford Wood, together with editorial director AA Gill.

Their original aim was twofold. Firstly, to distill all this unrivalled travel experience for the first time into one online place, and secondly to act as a travel-writing collective syndicating their work. Such was the kudos associated with the site that friends, friends of friends and later, members of the public, were calling TI to ask how to book the wonderful hotels that they had read about on the site. These people were also looking for trustworthy recommendations on which hotels to stay in, trips to take, secret destinations, hideaway restaurants and general travelling tips. The site was growing organically and needed help with direction.

In 2004, current MD Marin Muyser joined the company and TI began to concentrate on monetizing and promoting the site. It continued to expand - using the writers' knowledge to create an unrivalled and informed database of boutique, luxury and design hotels around the world. A proprietary online booking distribution system known as Starfish was also introduced. Starfish now powers affiliate websites such as Mr and Mrs Smith, Hip Hotels, Instylehotels, Hedonist's Guide as well as the Travel Intelligence hotel booking site itself.

TI used a range of marketing channels and ideas. Obviously with such a great source of writers they've produced books - The Best of France and The Best of Spain. A synergy has been created with other companies by way of contra dealing and cross marketing, and these strategies have also helped build the TI brand. Also, travel SOS pamphlets (handy guides for emergencies) are given to customers as an added extra.

The company is hoping to expand this marketing opportunity with their publishing partners Hg2, Mr and Mrs Smith, Hip Hotels and Wallpaper*. A beautifully written newsletter goes out every month to a rapidly growing subscriber base (currently 83,000) of discerning, high-spending ABC1 travellers. Samples of newly commissioned travel writing were sent out quarterly as a marketing tool to selected subscribers, and throughout 2006 TI also ran an offline PR Press campaign using a PR agency.

But it hasn't always been plain sailing. Simon Nichols, head of business development for TI with responsibility for their affiliate network says, "We've had two major redesigns in two years - the problem was not that we changed it too often – it was that instead of concentrating on navigation and usability, we were more concerned with design."

"At times TI the site and Starfish - our affiliate marketing program - were moving down different paths and we didn’t have a clear idea as to how best to make the two systems work together", he admits.

TI has valuable online assets, including their in-house developed technology giving access to a unique database of stylish hotels (many bookable online), its own affiliate marketing program through Starfish AND a treasure trove of over 8,000 pages of content in the form of fantastic travel writing. All of them have been under-resourced until recently.

"You could argue that a number of our partners have utilized the tools we provided them with better than we have utilized them for our own site" continues Nichols.

TI had carried out limited PPC, mainly around generic keywords such as 'boutique hotels' and specific hotel names, but with no SEO specialist TI weren't maximizing one of their greatest assets - their content.

"TI really didn't realize how valuable the content was as a resource in online marketing terms and hadn't spent any time or expertise developing it." acknowledges Nichols.

After analyzing the results he focused on some short-term fixes, but the real shift in direction came when Marin Muyser (MD) brought in SEO specialist David Deutsch, who happily agreed to work with TI as Head of Online Marketing.

"Travel Intelligence has over 8000 pages of extremely rich and completely unoptimized content. When fully optimized it will be a force to be reckoned with, and taking on the big guys will be of particular satisfaction" beams Deutsch.

So TI went back to basics and rebuilt their marketing plan.

"The first step is simple meta-tagging, followed by building link popularity with properly managed SEO marketing." Deutsch adds.

Deutsch uses Wordtracker as his keyword research tool. "On analyzing the site we saw which keywords we should be using. 'Hotel review' for example, is a popular keyword but it doesn't bring in sales – and we want to optimize for keywords that focus on booking.”

Having identified the major changes on which to focus, Deutsch's next step for TI was to work out why they weren't at the top of the search engines when a user, for example, types in 'Paris Hotel'.

"TI has several hundred pages of subject matter but they weren’t optimized - all similar pages should focus on one general keyword like 'Paris Hotel' as well as on more specific individual/niche words such as Hotel Crillon Paris" explains Deutsch.

Some keywords can be irrelevant - one of our travel articles is about a famous ancient Greek statue; the story is written by a very erudite writer and is called 'Aphrodite of the Beautiful Ass.' Needless to say, this article brought thousands of the wrong type of visitor, who certainly weren't looking for the type of content we were offering!" says Deutsch.

"Wordtracker's keyword research tool is so useful. If I want to focus on Paris in order to attract all the relevant traffic from those looking in that sector I need to know that people are searching with both 'luxury hotels Paris' and 'five star hotel Paris'.

"I can also use keyword research for reverse SEO - finding out which keywords were used to visit my site. Web analytics gives me 50,000 keywords. I can look at each keyword and they can be removed if all they are producing is bouncing traffic. Or I can take them and type them into Wordtracker and it will show which other terms someone who used that particular word also uses. I can add those terms to target more keywords and attract more traffic."

Deutsch finds tracking unique visitors of prime importance. "I can check out how many pages our visitors look at, starting at the page they enter the site on, to see how popular that content is. If there is nowhere else for a user to go to from that page - you lose them. Every link in the menu bar should relate to the subject matter. An average visitor should see 8 pages while a great visitor will see 100. This process helps improve navigation as you can find out how people move through the site instead of randomly having to guess."

"Once the site has been SEO’d, extra strands of content added, and the navigation sorted - then the fun starts. The focus is now on keywords which will drive sales. This applies to PPC [pay per click] traffic too - I want to know which clicks lead to action. I use Wordtracker to weed out general keywords that bring traffic but not sales – for example, I don't bid on 'beautiful ass'." Deutsch jokes.

Keyword: beautiful ass Unique visitors: 200

Bounce Rate (people who left as soon as they saw the page) - 182 bounces (92%)

Aphrodite of the Beautiful Ass

Number 8 on Google search. Google Page Rank for this page 0/10.

"The end result when using keyword research for PPC is a keyword list of several hundred thousand words, attracting the correct type of visitor to your site, together with proper website usability to produce a 2% or more sales conversion rate", concludes Deutsch. Big boys beware!