The Telluride Tourism Board’s previous site had monumental challenges with SEO and visitor retention/conversion. They faced a special SEO challenge after being completely sandbagged by Google for presumably black-hat practices and/or keyword and link stuffing by a previous SEO agency. A new Drupal site was the perfect opportunity to clean the slate.
In November 2008, we were contracted to redevelop the Telluride Tourism Boards website. Their site, at that time, was nowhere to be found on the search engines and had massive content and usability issues. The brand was poorly represented in terms of design and desireability.
In terms of visitor retention, conversion and online sales, there was an obvious need to not only increase traffic, but to retain visitors and convert them to customers. After identifying the many user turn-offs on the previous site, the new site’s architecture, layout, call to actions and funnel were all strategically designed to overcome any prior barriers to conversion. Giving users what they want right away on the homepage - and clear navigation throughout the site and an OpenX banner module for the client to manage and promote holiday packages - delivered an effective, easy-to-use information portal.
We needed to start fresh and present search engines with a high-quality, well-optimized site worth indexing. SEO actions and features included:
Within two weeks of the launch, the new site went from nearly invisible (not even in top five pages for all but two of our identified keywords) up to the first and second page of Google.com (US) for most keywords, including third for the coveted “Telluride,” second for “telluride vacation,” third for “Telluride Skiing” and so on. Google organic search traffic increased 574% within the first three weeks of the site's introdcution.
The result? Over the first three weeks of www.visittelluride.com being live, visits were only up 49%, and pageviews were up 308%! That’s a 175% increase in pages per visit and a 47% improvement in bounce rate (from 68% to a more respectable 36%). Average time on the site was up 55%. Meanwhile, online sales saw a 335% improvement in conversion rate and a 600% increase in purchased products. Previous online transactions were minimal, so these percentages are bloated, but the goal of driving visitors to online booking options was definitely achieved.
Less than a year after the site relaunched, visits totalled over 31,000, up 25% compared to the previous period and up 111% over March of last year. The team at the Telluride Tourism Board have engaged VentureWeb in an online marketing contract since August 2009 and continue to work closely with us to achieve the goal of a #1 ranking in Google's organic search for the term "Telluride."