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 & link stuffing by a previous SEO agency. Traffic suffered leading up to the new site launch, due to non-existent Google listings. The new Drupal site was a perfect opportunity to start clean slate and present search engines with a high-quality, well-optimized site worth indexing. SEO actions & features included:

    *Page Titles & Nodewords module: with thorough research & rewriting of all meta data throughout the site, per page
    *Extensive 301 redirect added to .htaccess
    *Immediate uploading of new sitemap to webmaster tools
    *Clean URLs
    *Global Redirect
    *Relevant but not excessive interlinking throughout site

Within 2 weeks of the new site launch, the site went from not on the radar (not even in top 5 pages) for all but two of our identified keywords, rising to the 1st and 2nd page of Google.com (US) for most keywords, includnig #3 for the coveted “Telluride”, #2 for “telluride vacation”, #3 for “Telluride Skiing”, and so on. Google organic search traffic went up 574% over the first 3 weeks of the new site.

On to visitor retention, conversion and online sales, there was an obvious need to not only increase traffic but retain visitors and get them converting to customers. After identifying any user turn-off’s on the previous site, the new site’s architecture, layout, call-outs and funnel were all strategically designed to overcome the previous barriers to conversion. Giving users what they want right away on the homepage, with clear navigation throughout the site to get them where they need to be, and an OpenX banner module for the client to manage and promote holiday packages.

The result... over the first 3 weeks of the site being live, visits were only up 49% yet pageviews were up 308%! That’s a 175% increase in pages/visit and a 47% improvement in bounce rate (from 68% to a more respectable 36%). Average time on site was up 55%. Meanwhile online sales saw 335% improvement in conversion rate, and 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.