Promotion Case Study - Main Street Bed and Breakfast Reservation Service

Mary C. | 16 October 2004 |

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Promotion Case Study - Main Street Bed and Breakfast Reservation Service
Mindi Cabe, Promotion Account Manager - Blizzard Internet Marketing

Last December, Sharon Grona of Main Street Bed and Breakfast Reservation Service in Fredericksburg, Texas, decided it was time to take their website promotion to the next level. They had a Custom I Promotion Plan that was sending some nice traffic, but they knew that they were still leaving a lot of money on the table by being focused mostly on pay-per-click search engines, with little resources put toward the performance of organic listings.

They decided to upgrade to a Custom III Promotion Plan. Their account manager began more aggressive campaigns in Google AdWords and Overture, optimized their site for better performance in free search engine results and initiated more link building programs. The results of this program have been impressive.

From January 1, 2003 to October 1, 2003 they received 29,726 visitors, or an average of 108 visitors per day, and 112,463 page views. For the same time period in 2004 they received 52,050 visitors, or 189 visitors per day, and 198,175 page views. This is a 74% increase in traffic.

How has the optimization and link building fared? In January of 2004, the paid listings that they were receiving through Overture from their Custom Promotion I plan were delivering good results, but their free listings were virtually nowhere to be found. They were not in the top 100 results in Google for the important search terms “fredericksburg texas bed and breakfast” and “fredericksburg tx bed and breakfast”. Here are their current Google rankings for the following terms:

Search Term                      Home Page Rank      Interior Page Rank
fredericksburg bed breakfast                8                  9
fredericksburg texas bed and breakfast    18              19
fredericksburg tx bed and breakfast       19                 20

You can now find them on the first two pages for their three most important terms. The increase that they enjoy in traffic and bookings speaks to the importance of this new visibility. The link popularity numbers give us a clue as to the success of the link building campaign. In January of 2004, they had a total link popularity of 155 links. They currently have a link popularity of 273 links, an increase of 77%. Further, their link popularity in Google for the same time period nearly doubled from 13 to 21 links. More important than these statistics is the increase in the bottom line that Sharon has seen and the fact that bookings this year are up from the same time period last year.

As impressive as these numbers are, we are still only nine months into their Custom III Promotion Plan. As their account manager continues the aggressive, multi-faceted marketing of their website, we should see all of these numbers increase even further.