VisitScotland is the national tourism organisation for Scotland, its main aim being to contribute significantly to the advancement of Scottish tourism by giving it a real presence in the global marketplace and benefiting the whole of Scotland.
Occupancy Marketing carried out a 3-year internet marketing consultancy programme with VisitScotland from 2005 - 2008.
Our Service
On commencement of Occupancy Marketing's contract with VisitScotland in 2005 the foreign language websites - having historically relatively low levels of visitor traffic - were a particular area of concern. Occupancy Marketing was responsible for developing an approach to marketing the 8 International Touring websites (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Benelux, Swiss & Catalan). Working with the e-Business team and relevant brand managers, Occupancy Marketing created a revised structure for the websites to allow for significantly better search engine results.
As VisitScotland had their own in-house linguists within International Marketing, we worked very closely with the in-house teams to develop and optimise the new copy, taking the websites one by one.
Our services included:
- Technical Audit / Site Structure Design
- Full in-country Keyword Research & Gap Analysis
- On-Page SEO (carried out by Touring team under guidance from Occupancy Marketing)
- New Content Recommendations
- Metadata SEO
- Submissions to in-country directories, forums, Wiki and search engines
- On-going support and SEO knowledge to teams
- Web Analytics Reporting
- Account Management
Results
With Occupancy Marketing's optimisation work, VisitScotland managed to secure and maintain a number of top 'Scotland'-themed travel keywords in European versions of major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. SEO work also included focus on the deeper level site pages and 'long tail' search numbers also increased as a consequence.
Figures taken from the VisitScotland performance measurement documents show the following annual increases for International Touring sites:
Visits via search, VisitScotland International Gateway Sites, 2004 - 2007