Expanding the Inn Collection Group’s Online Presence to Give Them the Edge in a Highly Competitive Market

To increase the number of page-one keywords that the Inn Collection Group rank for to drive bookings

Having already established themselves as a key operator in the tourism industry in the north, The Inn Collection Group wanted to take things a step further and invest heavily in search engine optimisation.

Their main goal was to rank for non-branded keywords – such as ‘Berwick upon Tweed accommodation’ and ‘restaurants near Durham’ – so that potential customers, who weren’t specifically searching for an Inn Collection Group inn, could find them.

Widening their net of customer acquisition was a key feature of the brief.

Very soon, the Embryo team understood what was needed – three things:
• Firstly, we knew we would need to drive traffic to the site via search engines and relevant keywords.
• Secondly, we would need to supplement this first stage with engaging content that would help to increase bookings – the entire point of The Inn Collection Group’s online presence.
• Finally, we would need a clear strategy to split our resources across specific inns, ensuring that all the target locations would perform, as well as drive bookings and revenue.

These were the elements that would best prime the company’s website for success in an extremely competitive marketplace.

This first stage was vital as it gave us the platform from which to apply our tried-and-tested methods of search engine optimisation and content marketing. From there, our Organic team underwent extensive keyword research into terms that users were searching for when looking for accommodation similar to those of the Inn Collection group venues.

Once these were found, the Organic team then split the monthly resource across 3 pre-selected inn websites and worked on adding fresh, optimised content to pages on those sites. This content was written in the group’s brand voice and featured all the ontologically relevant phrases that would help support the performance of the pages for the keywords that we were wanting to rank on page one for.

This content we created supported existing content and centred around increasing the amount of local content on the relevant pages. This was to help the group rank for crucial, local key terms that were being searched by people looking to book accommodation with a business such as The Inn Collection Group.

Whilst our content team was busy crafting this content, our technical SEO team underwent a comprehensive search engine optimisation audit, comprised of page speed and structure and links. This audit identified areas which our tech team then fixed, taking the health score of the site from 36/100 to 71/100.