Building Organic Traffic To A Brand New Website

A common issue SEO’s and Digital Marketeers face is how to build traffic to a new site, especially when the new site is an entrant to a competitive market. Google is thought by many to favour older, more established sites. Whilst this may not be entirely true, it does favour more established, trustworthy pages and it also recognises the value of links to the pages, which tends to favour older, more established sites.

Although Google does now index pages much faster than it used to, there is still a natural amount of time that it takes for pages to become more visible. So, all in all, it is generally much easier to rank or improve ranks to an older, more established site and we always try to manage the expectations of any site owner with a new site and big hopes.

This case study illustrates how Zelst developed and implemented a strategy to build search visibility organically and deliver a massive gain in traffic and rankings for a new company in the travel industry.

After a poor personal holiday experience, our client saw a gap in the market for a particular type of niche travel site and decided to set up a new website to exploit the opportunity.

The company initially used a local web developer and the SEO company that they recommended. Recognising fairly soon that the SEO company wouldn’t be suitable to help the company to achieve its objectives, Zelst were referred via an agency who had worked with Zelst previously.

Zelst met with the couple to discuss their objectives, present position, competition, resources and timescales. Zelst were then able to develop a strategy that would achieve the company’s objectives within the timescale and with the resources available.

"Unlike other agencies, Zelst were extremely realistic in their initial analysis, did not overpromise and spelt out a clear timescale for what would be done and what effect this would have. We felt confident in the strategy that was proposed and were able to plan our business development accordingly.

Within 12 months, not only had Zelst completed all of the work that they had outlined needed to be done and achieved the benchmarks that they had set out, but they achieved the ranking and traffic targets set a full six months ahead of schedule.

They are clear and transparent in their communication, extremely professional, knowledgeable and excel at their job."

Travel and Tourism
Managing Director

In such a competitive industry, Zelst emphasised that many of the top line keyword phrase targets would be initially out of reach.

However, they delivered a fully researched and analysed keyword and content strategy that focused on gaining a foothold on a variety of long tail phrases.

Zelst then gradually built upon this so that the site should be ranking for its core target terms within 12-15 months.

Within 12 months of starting the campaign, the number of traffic driving landing pages had increased by 24,300%, the number of top ranking keywords had increased by 767%, whilst the number of non-branded keywords in the top 3 rose by 550%, including 2 of the core target keywords that were set as long term targets. All contributing to a 23,753% increase in organic search traffic and a very successful first year for the business.

Sandra and Mark were able to build on this and plan for the future and within a further 12 months were vying with the incumbent market leaders for top visibility and market leadership.