Promotion Case Study - Elk Mountain Lodge

Mary C. | 15 March 2005 |

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Customer Overview
Elk Mountain Lodge, a Blizzard client since 2001, is a Crested Butte, Colorado bed and breakfast. Each year, they have become more aggressive with online promotion in response to an increase in their return on investment (ROI). In 2004, Elk Mountain Lodge took another big step by having Blizzard redesign their website.

Goals
Drive more qualified traffic to the website by increasing internet presence
Increase revenue generated by the website
Get a new website designed that is more representative of the property and better converts site traffic into bookings, with special emphasis on getting the home page to bring guests further into the site

Strategy
The client worked closely with Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. to develop a plan to steadily and significantly improve their website performance with users and in major search engines. The key ingredients to the plan were:

Focus on better performance in search engines:

*Optimize the site for search engine performance for Crested Butte and Colorado terms, as these are the most important in the area

*Make building link popularity a focus of the promotion

*Expand their market with increased keyword implementation

*Use pay-per-click resources to enhance search engine presence

Redesign strategies

*Focus on better conversion of viewers into booking guests

*Create a design that highlights the property and Crested Butte

Results
Here are the results since July of 2004.

In Google alone, Elk Mountain Lodge now has over 50 targeted search terms for which it appears in the "organic" listings on the first two pages. The most notable of these terms are: "crested butte accommodation", "crested butte bed and breakfast" and "crested butte lodging".

For a fair comparison, we wanted to compare similar time periods from 2004 vs. 2005. We chose January and February because it is high season in Crested Butte. In January 2004, the web site received an average of 88 visitors per day. In January 2005, it received an average of 143 visitors per day. This is an increase of over 61%; this is especially impressive for a site that was already previously well promoted.

The results for the February were equally impressive. In February 2004, they also averaged 73 visitors per day; in February 2005, they received an impressive 117 visitors per day, a 62% increase in traffic.

Submission to a couple of different link building programs has increased link popularity from 276 total links in August 2004 to 551 total links in February 2005, virtually a 100% increase in six months!

Not only has traffic gone up, but the redesign has been more successful than even we could have imagined. The old website had a home page bounce rate of over 50%. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave a site after viewing a particular page, and is a great indicator of how viewers find the attractiveness and usability of a site. Since the new website was introduced, that home page bounce rate has been dropped to an astounding rate of under 5%. This means over 95% of the visitors to their site are making it to an interior page. This is one of the lowest bounce rates we have ever seen. We want to caution people that we can’t guarantee that all redesigns will be this successful, but we are confident that a great design makes all the difference.

Conclusion
Owner Mike Nolan states "The visits to my website grow consistently every year. I feel very confident that Blizzard is responsible for the success of my site. They are ahead of the game with new technology and great suggestions. From design to marketing, Blizzard is the one stop shop." Visit Elk Mountain Lodge’s new website at www.elkmountainlodge.net.

Russ Cabe, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.