Our task was to realise this vision without losing loyal customers from either entity by confusing them or diluting the brand experience they had previously enjoyed. In addition to this, De Vere had decided to further split the product offering creating two levels of leisure experience making a range of hotel products to suit different customer groups:

• De Vere Deluxe
• De Vere Heritage
• De Vere Venues.

What we did

The new site we developed is a mixture of business and pleasure. Our internal brief was very demanding; requiring the site to improve performance in all areas as well as deliver a superlative customer experience.

The site was carefully designed based on thorough user research, conducted in our usability lab. We worked hard, investigating different customer types, understanding their motivations, and developing the site architecture around the information we had gathered in order to create a site that is elegant and intuitive to use.

The new site delivered in spades, boasting features that engaged the visitor with a seductive, luxurious animation to introduce the new brand; interactive maps and golf course guides to provide more information in an interesting and easy to use way; and finally, a completely overhauled route to booking that streamlined the process from entry to sale.

Highlights

• Overall online sales are 40% up year-on-year
• Average booking value up 120%
• The site's performance integrated with off-site communications has delivered an ROI of 12,500%
• The website increased overall revenue from online from 5% to 35%

Equator was briefed to extend the reach of the SEO campaign into new areas.  Through consultation, it was determined that the objective of the campaign would be to embrace generic search terms within the website and deliver incremental sales. The objectives were to increase visitors to the site year-on-year by an average of 10%.

Natural Search Strategy - Keyword Strategy

The keyword strategy was developed to:

• Ensure that the website maximised visibility for all brand related search terms.
• Target the 'location' related search traffic - and deliver it directly to the most appropriate hotels within the portfolio.
• Target 'activity' related search traffic - such as golf breaks, etc to attract more traffic with a propensity to generate higher average bookings values.

Natural the site to support the search campaign

Every aspect of the De Vere website was analysed creating a strong 'on-site strategy'. The onsite strategy was to give search engines and users the best experience on the website; aiding not only the natural search results of the website but also its ability to convert visitors into sales. The strategy understood that on-site SEO must take account of all other market channels and is not solely about gaining website hits, but more to do with getting sales and maximising the ROI for De Vere Hotels.

To achieve this, actions included:

• Re-focusing of all Title Data to improve search engine positioning.
• Re-targeting of all Meta Data to improve click through rate from search engine positions.
• Reserving and Retargeting header tags for content use.
• Ensuring all content units were effectively tagged.
• Reframing Calls to action within content to improve conversion.
• Improving the keyword relevancy of the web pages.
• Develop 'linkable' content within the website through the use of the press area of the website.

Off-site Strategy

Having thoroughly researched the back-link profiles of De Vere Hotels and 60 other websites within the highly related UK hotel industry we developed our core offsite strategy.

Results

Based on year-on-year performance, Equator had used Organic Search Engine Positioning to:

• Increase visitors by over 400%
• Delivered almost £3.6 million in bookings
• Generated over 13,000 incremental bookings
• Resulted in 1.25 million incremental visitors
• Given De Vere a ROI of 46:1!