Mackinlay Kidd

Mackinlay Kidd offer self-drive holiday itineraries throughout Scotland and its islands, designed to suit personal requirements. Their hand-picked hotel accommodation helps clients discover empty beaches, explore tropical gardens, spot whales and dolphins or simply relax into island life

Objective

To increase the number of conversions through the website and decrease the cost per conversion.

Example

See www.seescotlanddifferently.com. Or try a Google search for ‘short breaks in Scotland’ (sponsored links).

Client comment

“As a small and relatively new business we were at stage where it was time to "call in the experts" to help move our internet marketing on to a whole new level. Chorial offered a responsive and incisive answer to our needs. They offered expertise in both search engine optimisation as well as internet advertising. They also helped coach us in implementing their recommendations, which has helped contribute to a significant increase in our business.” Robert Kidd, Director

Description

The project was o advise on improving the existing Google and Yahoo!/Overture activity and recommend search optimisation terms and techniques. This extract from the written proposal gives a flavour of the work required:

1. Search engine optimisation
Keyword research to find the best terms for optimising pages.  Combine these with the key phrases and modifiers from the client, prepare a full analysis of search position and then improve the optimisation for the 10 weakest key phrases. Optimisation includes a) making recommendations at the site level for page structure, use of style sheets and metadata and b) editing individual pages using your content management system.

2. Link plan
Logfile analysis to identify websites already referring visitors and competitor analysis to examine their links and tactics. Identify sources of new links, both offline and online. Prepare a plan to improve the effectiveness of existing links (if possible) and add 100 new links. Then acquire links over several months.

3. Adwords
One-off review of the existing activity to improve Return On Investment and conversion rate. The review includes the structure of the campaigns and Adgroups, ad copy, split tests, the choice of search terms, bid cost, search term conversion rates and landing pages.

We also eventually advised on domain names and the domain redirection strategy. The existing Google Adwords campaign was best improved by being replaced and Chorial did the research and implementation for a large (20,000 keywords) set of campaigns.

Keyword research was conducted using online tools and resources and from logfile analysis. In such a competitive industry, it was essential to take a ‘triage’ approach to keyword selection by identifying main words and modifiers and assigning them to one of three categories:

• Lot of competition, few searches – leave to Pay Per Click.
• Lots of competition, lots of searches – would be very expensive as PPC, so worth the considerable effort of optimisation.
• Little competition, lots of searches - ideal for optimisation but rare so will have to dig deep.

The differential performance of ‘scotland’ and ‘scottish’ was particularly challenging and, in the end, very useful.