SUCCESS STORY
How to Increase CTR (and Rankings) through Title Tag Testing
A TravelBoom Marketing Case Study on Rush Creek Lodge
With an ever-changing landscape in the land of SEO, digital marketers are always looking for ways to be proactive.
From on-page copy to schema markup, the laundry list of optimizations for search are never-ending. Not all improvements have to be revolutionary, though.
TravelBoom Marketing sought to increase both ranking and click-through rate through title tag testing for Rush Creek Lodge.
The result? Year-over-year growth worth a standing ovation.
Situation and Background
Rush Creek Lodge, a relaxed, yet sophisticated resort and spa located in the woodlands of Yosemite National Park, was looking for simple ways to increase rankings and click-through rate for their website’s homepage.
TravelBoom reviewed the keywords that the homepage was ranking for, analyzed major competitors and looked for ways to improve.
Key Factors:
- TravelBoom found that the Rush Creek Lodge homepage title tag was targeting the keyword phrase “yosemite lodge.” Based on our initial research, our team of expert hotel marketers discovered that a local competitor was frequently referred to as “Yosemite Lodge.”
Methodology
Using data from both Google Search Console and Moz, TravelBoom identified current rankings, impressions and click-through rate for the Rush Creek Lodge homepage.
Based on this information, we tested a new title tag that better highlighted the content of the page.
- “Yosemite Lodge | Rush Creek Lodge Yosemite National Park” → “Yosemite Lodging | Rush Creek Lodge Yosemite National Park”
The homepage was then submitted to Google Search Console for reindexing.
Learn more about selecting the right target keywords for your top hotel website pages.
Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.
Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
Results and Analysis
When comparing the same period YoY, TravelBoom found that the Rush Creek Lodge homepage moved from page 3 to page 1 for the keyword ‘yosemite lodging’ within Google’s search engine results page (monthly search volume 11.5k-30.3k).
765%
Increase in Impressions
300%
Click-through Rate
Summary
Ongoing title tag testing of high-converting website pages is a simple way to achieve improved rankings and higher click-through rates. With some investigation, experimentation and continued monitoring, big things can happen.
Learn more about the small but mighty optimizations you can make to your hotel website for a lasting impact.