Task:
Sterling Holiday Resorts Limited (commonly referred as “Sterling”), a leading holiday lifestyle company headquartered in Chennai, India, has been in the business of providing exceptional holiday experiences to their guests for over three decades. Their booking website (and also their corporate website) was experiencing lower footfalls amidst a scenario where the market was dominated by online travel agencies and big hotel chains. The larger and well-established brands enjoyed organic traffic to their websites from an aspect of branded and category keywords, making it difficult for Sterling to get the required traffic to its website. Additionally, in terms of visibility, there was ambiguity in the minds of the general public whether Sterling was catering only for their VO segment (Vacation Ownership or Timeshare segment) customers, or if they also catered to the FIT (Free Independent Traveller) segment. The Covid-19 pandemic also added to the challenges faced, by causing a huge dip in the search volumes for the category as a whole, impacting Sterling too.
Solution:
Rage was tasked with the objective of effecting a significant increase in Sterling’s website traffic. After a detailed study of the website pages, Rage worked on a set of SEO initiatives over a period of a year, which covered the following:
- FIT Blog rework
- Upgrade of offers & packages content and presentation – Implementation of additional features
- Connecting the Blog to the website URL
- Resolving H1 Tags issues
- Addressed search console issues – core web vitals
- Re-energizing Blogs for SEO
- Upgrade of footer with exhaustive links of all resorts
Rage also addressed hygiene aspects such as:
- XML sitemap creation
- Implementing canonical tags
- Not found links – 301 redirection update
- Regular updates of meta tags in the website and Blog
- Regular keyword suggestions and content creation for Blog
- Adding the Blog website in the header