Before COVID-19, Harvest Tour’s main method of attracting customers and filling busses was word of mouth, and utilising third-party booking agents (like Rezdy).
When business is good, agencies like Rezdy taking a cut of the booking fee is a small price to pay for not worrying too much about serious marketing. With COVID-19, all of a sudden that cut isn’t quite as easy to swallow, and the seats weren’t selling as fast.
The other tough break was the massive competition in tourism post the pandemic slump, with businesses going hard trying to capture the newly engaged market.
Harvest Tours opted to get ahead and focus harder than ever on their marketing and advertising. The channel they chose was digital, specifically focusing on trying to sell more seats directly through their own website, and fill busses without help from Rezdy or other booking agencies.
That’s when they turned to Dilate. We started their campaign in December 2020 to try and grow their business organically, raising their visibility and getting them to the top of consumer minds.
By optimising for search, you’re making your business visible to people that are actively looking for a product, service or experience like yours. In the case of Harvest Tours, our goal was to make them as visible as possible to people actively looking to experience the Margaret River region, via a tour.
Google somewhat levels the playing field. The average person searching for a tour generally doesn’t have a great deal of familiarity with the current offerings, or preferred tour providers. They know what they want, but don’t yet know who they want to give it to them.
Our mission for Harvest Tours was therefore pretty simple. Take a brilliant small business, with a proven track record for delivering outstanding service and tours, and help people find them. In a way, COVID-19 was something of a catalyst for a change that was already coming - and damned if we weren’t going to help Harvest Tours ride that wave.
Here’s how we did it.
The core of any strong SEO strategy is learning how best to tap into the intent of the end customer. What are people searching for when they want to book tours in Margaret River? We kicked off with in-depth research, crawling through competitors’ sites and keywords trends to identify which terms had the most potential to drive results for Harvest Tours. Once we had a winning list, we mapped their website against these terms, designing each page to focus on a particular topic.
For tourism companies, content is absolutely a crucial part of the conversion process. This is where you tell the story behind the brand, give them a sense of the true tour experience and inspire them to take the next step.
Harvest Tours offer incredible experiences, and there's a reason all their customers rave about them. We wanted to make sure that their tour pages reflected just how damn good their tours are, and did them justice. Customers these days really want to know everything, down to the finest details. So we made sure the itinerary was informative and thorough to give customers a taste of the unforgettable experience they would have on a Harvest tour.
The tourism industry is highly visual and emotionally driven. The photos, videos and design elements on your website should give customers a taste of what’s to come when they book with you. Whether you want them to feel relaxed, excited or blissful, web design is one of the most powerful ways to do that.
Harvest Tours original homepage didn’t necessarily speak to the right customer, which meant higher bounce rates and lower conversions. We shifted the page’s focus towards emotive colours and inspiring imagery to capture the right audience and leave them with a positive experience. We also restructured their site and created individual tour pages to help lead customers on a clear journey.
Having amazing visuals and engaging copy is one thing, making sure people can find your website is another. Part of that process is growing your online presence and improving your online authority. Getting other websites to point back to yours tells Google that your website is worth clicking on. You’ve got good stuff that people want to read.
For Harvest Tours, that meant getting them in the right online directories and making sure they’ve got a networked web presence. Strengthening their off page links tells Google that this is a wine touring company that should be more visible on the search results page.
Getting people to your website is one thing. Helping them follow through and take the actions you want is another. Part of the SEO journey is conversion optimisation, making it as easy for visitors as possible to take the next step. One of the really cool things we did for Harvest was restructuring their pages to include a booking form for the exact tour they wanted on each tour page by creating an iframe that was pre-set to that tour.
What this did was shorten the user journey. Instead of clicking through a “book now” button, getting taken to another form, choosing the tour they wanted, viewing the available dates and so on, people can now peruse a tour and make a booking all on one page.
Harvest Tours wanted more bookings and greater brand awareness, which we’ve helped them achieve, but the results won’t stop there.
As we said, SEO is a long term process. It’s an investment, one that requires ongoing care to get ahead and stay there. At Dilate, we’ve got a focus on sustainable brand awareness – making sure businesses like Harvest Tours are set up to keep on growing bigger and better every year.
With a focus on the right opportunities, user-oriented design and compelling content creation, Harvest Tours has been able to expand beyond word of mouth marketing and pull in a wider range of customers. It also means they are top of mind for the peak season, to help them continue to stand out even amongst the saturation of advertising.
All this SEO work we have done with Harvest Tours also lays the groundwork for future digital advertising. For example, if they wanted to start running PPC ads on Google or Facebook, having an optimised website will reduce cost per click, making the ads cheaper and more effective.
We’re over the moon to have seen amazing results with Harvest Tours since December 2020, and we look forward to all that’s to come.
Want to improve your Google rankings and drive bookings? Chat with the experts.
If you’re looking for sustainable business growth and better brand visibility, Dilate can help plan and implement a robust SEO strategy to get you there. We’re a team of passionate digital marketers with a solid track record and a commitment to transparent and sustainable methods.
Ready to see what we can do for you? Call us today on 1300 345 283 or send through an enquiry
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