Promotion Case Study - The Kingsley House

Mary C. | 12 January 2005 |

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PROMOTION CASE STUDY
Russ Cabe, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

Client Profile:
The Kingsley House is an inn in the Saugatuck area of Michigan close to Lake Michigan. In 2003, the property was purchased by David Drees and early in 2004 he decided he really needed to improve his website design and increase the site’s presence on the internet.

The Challenge:
Get a new website designed that is more representative of the property and better converts traffic into bookings.
Drive more qualified traffic to their website by increasing internet presence.
Increase revenue generated by website.

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

1. Some of the strategies focused on in the redesign of the site were:
Focus on building a diverse set of packages and specials on the website because of their ability to convert traffic into bookings.
Develop a plan to consistently add content to the website to increase attractiveness to search engines.

2. Focus more on performance in "natural" or "organic" search engine listings.
Make building link popularity a focus on his promotion.
Expand their market with increased keyword implementation
Optimize site for search engine performance for Saugatuck, MI terms, as these are the most important in the area.

The Results:
Nine months into their promotion plan, this is what we have seen so far:
For a fair comparison, we wanted to compare similar time periods from 2003 vs. 2004. We chose October because it is high season and December because it is low season. In October ‘03 they received an average of 77 visitors per day. In October of ‘04 they received an average of 245 visitors per day. This is an increase of over 300%.

The results for the December were equally impressive. In December ‘03, they also averaged 77 visitors per day, but in December ‘04 they received an impressive 199 visitors per day, even during the slow season, still a 258% increase in traffic.

In 4 short months their link popularity has climbed from 471 to 991 total links. Even more importantly the backward links in Google climbed from 32 to 43 total links. This is one of the most important factors in getting a site to perform well in organic listings.

Where once this small site had few pages, they now show a site saturation in MSN of 118 pages and in October of ‘04 the guestrooms page is receiving 66% as many visitors as their home page. This shows that the traffic is getting to the information we want them to see.

Where once the site was nowhere to be found for Saugatuck terms, it now comes up in the first two pages for "Saugatuck MI bed and breakfast" and "Saugatuck Michigan bed and breakfast" in all 3 major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, and Google).

Conclusion:
The Kingsley House is enjoying the rewards of a fairly straightforward strategy. By making the website more appealing to site visitors and search engines, traffic to the website has increased significantly in a fairly short time. We also see that a healthy percentage of site visitors are clicking-through to the guestrooms page and organic search engine performance (that which is available without paying for each click-through to the client’s website) is strengthening.

"I’m definitely busier than I was a year ago as my Inn’s occupancy rate has increased dramatically even during my "low" season. I attribute that to a combination of better hospitality, better packages and better marketing efforts. Thanks to the help of Blizzard’s web design and marketing efforts, a new romantic getaways page was launched just last week. I’m very excited about the potential increased traffic this will bring to my site in 2005!"

David Drees, The Kingsley House