NeedABreak: Strategic SEO refurbishment brings rewards.

Overview

Needabreak.com is the editorial hub for Choice Hotels’ APAC operation, providing travel inspiration for weekend trips, staycations and interstate adventures across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). A major hotel player internationally, Choice Hotels operates more than 170 Hotels in ANZ, and has franchises in 40 countries and territories globally.

Challenge

Prior to engaging Revium, Needabreak.com had numerous technical SEO challenges that are common with off-the-shelf WordPress websites. These included:

• An under-developed site architecture that was causing content indexation issues, and limited internal linking and discovery for customers due to orphaned content (a JavaScript-powered Load More button was often the only way to access articles).

• Duplicate content that was cannibalising each other as a result of limitations of the site design.

• Missing meta descriptions and sub-optimal meta titles that did not reflect search intent or keyword targeting.

• Slow performance, with 27% of page experiences failing the Google Core Web Vitals speed benchmark.

In addition, content success stories were not being fully capitalised due to a lack of data-driven insights available via their existing content calendar, while featured brand relationships were not fully capitalised on resulting in one-way coverage.

Choice Hotels sought a digital partner to overhaul the SEO foundations of Needabreak.com in order to significantly improve organic search performance.

Solution

The Revium team set about building out a holistic SEO strategy that incorporated best practice technical SEO application, page experience optimisations, and an audience-centric, data-led content production workflow.

Improving the site architecture was the first step and involved the development of an internal linking strategy using keyword-rich anchor text. This was informed by keyword research that leveraged high authority pages to improve indexation and the rankings of secondary content.

Indexation was consistently improved upon through weekly Google Search Console and Screaming Frog troubleshooting, along with an outreach program to featured brands for social media coverage. Ongoing speed audits and optimisation reviews were also undertaken.

A revitalised content calendar and content production schedule was also created to capitalise on success stories like the School Holiday Planners campaign and other untapped opportunities, which in turn resulted in the publication of popular content series, such as their Classic Road Trips and 48-Hour City Stays. Demand-led search was set up for both campaigns and aligned to the interests of the target audience. As evergreen topics, the campaigns are periodically updated to quickly attain traffic, resulting in high performance.

Outcome

Many strides have been made since the SEO strategy rolled out, including:

• Indexation has improved dramatically, with non-indexed pages reduced by 91%.

• Speed has improved, with a decrease in page experiences failing the Core Web Vitals speed test (down from 27% to 15%).

• Rankings have improved, with a year-on-year increase in total organic rankings of +107%, page 1 rankings +148%, and top 3 rankings +250%.

• Traffic has increased year-on-year, with sessions up by +164% (4,846 newly added keywords and search phrases are driving this session growth).