FishTravel Case Study

Before we start telling you this story, let us introduce you to our client. FishTravel is a fishing tour booking service that covers the majority of the states and Mexico. The tour selection is automated and based on the Uber model, which helps optimize the search. The company is planning on expanding coverage to Latin American countries and raising investments of 300 million US dollars.

When we started working on the project, it had just passed the MVP stage, and the client’s team was preparing for upscaling. 29 out of 900 locations were ready, and they planned on adding around 50 every month. The project had a website that, however, didn’t generate any traffic, didn’t have an established structure or landing pages.

The client’s main request was to attract leads through the organic search channel: we had to raise traffic and conversion, which would bring quality leads.

We Delve into the Project

In the beginning of any project, we run a competitive analysis to fully understand the niche and set benchmarks. This project was no exception, and we started by defining the competitors’ demand and traffic value. It became clear that the US has a very competitive ranking within the niche. The top 30 positions in mid-frequency search results belonged to such huge aggregators as fishingbooker.com, tripadvisor, as well as the local competitors’ websites optimized and promoted according to keywords and target requests.

Our next step was to determine the interests and key search requests of our target audience, specifically what they were searching for. To accomplish this, we collected semantic data. We also recognized the need to implement keywords on pages and add new pages in the later stages of the project. To expedite this process, we segmented the semantic core.

We Make Predictions

We created a detailed 12-month traffic growth prediction and designed a work pipeline accordingly. Our predictions were supported by plans for link building and minor improvements. In addition, we took into account two important factors that would impact our further promotion strategy:

Factor No.1

The client’s business model limited our ability to increase the site’s link juice. The client’s website didn’t offer the user the option to choose a tour, instead the system suggested a tour automatically. Meanwhile, the main competitor had this option implemented on their website. As local operators were interested in placing their website links on the competitor's website, that boosted the competitor’s link juice to colossal values.

Factor No. 2

The client had a limited budget for SEO promotion.

After considering the client’s goals and available budget, we decided to build our own Private Blog Network (PBN) for the client. In terms of price-to-result ratio, a PBN was the most efficient tool for increasing link juice and promoting the website.

We Build the Website Structure

We designed the website and landing page structure. We also prepared detailed technical assignments for the client to create the website, landing page blocks and interlinking, taking into account client’s goals and SEO requirements.

The client already had a domain and website, but it lacked both landing pages and a structure suitable for our project. To address this, we decided to build a new website over the old one without deleting the old one. Our goal was to retain the existing link juice and, more importantly, to avoid losing Google's trust in the main domain. We believed this would help us speed up traffic growth for the new website. However, as the results showed, the website lost its status as a trusted domain and generated traffic as a brand new domain.

We Run a Health Check

Upon launching the website, we conducted a comprehensive health check and prepared technical assignments for developers to identify bugs and avoid SEO positioning mistakes. At the same time, we gradually increased link juice and monitored traffic growth.

However, we noticed that the growth curve did not match our predictions. Therefore, we conducted another health check. We checked manually and with Google Search Console, and used health check software to see if there were any bugs, but we could not detect any. Eventually, we found an error in Google cache and discovered that Googlebot received incorrect meta tags. Since it was a development bug, we pointed it out to the developers. They fixed it, and the results started to improve according to our predictions.

We assembled a team of experienced and skilled SEO experts and link builders to work on the project. Thanks to their collective efforts, we were able to quickly promote the website in the highly-competitive niche. The client’s team trusted us completely and implemented all of our technical assignments quickly. These factors helped us not only overcome all of the project’s constraints but also ensure steady traffic growth.

We built our relationship with the client based on principles of maximum engagement in the work process, timely reports, and transparency in terms of our results and methods. To ensure that our results matched predictions, we arranged weekly video calls with the client's team. At the end of each month, we provided a report to the client's team detailing the completed work scope for the month and a plan for the upcoming month. The client had free access to all links, technical assignments, and guides at any time during the project.

Despite the client’s budget limits and strong competition, our results consistently matched our predictions. After a year of work, we were able to promote the website to the 5th position in low-frequency search results and the 10th position in middle and high-frequency search results, attracting quality leads.