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Visit Cornwall

Building organic traffic

A Cornish Collaboration

Helping Cornwall’s official tourist board increase organic traffic

A partnership with Cornwall’s official tourist board, empowering them to level-up their website performance and help bring more visitors and revenue to the Cornish economy.

With organic traffic increasing by 105% versus the spring and summer season in 2023, the Visit Cornwall website now comfortably outperforms the tourism and hospitality industry averages.

Services
Code Review, UX & UI Design, Web Design, Web Development, WordPress Websites
Company Size

SME

Industry
Leisure & Hospitality
Range

£40,000 – £50,000

Website visitcornwall.com

The challenge

Regaining traction in organic site traffic

Visit Cornwall came to us for help in making their website perform better, making it easier to navigate and more visible in search engines, with the end goal being to improve organic search traffic.

Organic search traffic had fallen well below the usual levels since launching a new site and was showing only marginal signs of recovery. A few months after their new site launched, the Visit Cornwall team started to look for a new agency to help support them. They came to us to help address this, with a view to ensuring that the website delivered the expected or anticipated levels of organic search traffic.

On top of issues with their website, the whole travel industry is suffering from global political and financial uncertainty, with holidays lower down on people’s agenda in a cost of living crisis.

This is the sort of challenge we relish, especially with an industry leading client like Visit Cornwall, who provide a window to Cornwall for hundreds of thousands of people from across the world. We love helping to make our home in Cornwall more visible to a global audience.

The solution

Back to basics

We went back to basics with Visit Cornwall, forming a partnership that would work on a monthly basis to dig deep into the site, find issues and address them.

Our approach was to look at technical SEO best practices, mainly focused on physical site structure, as the rebuild that had impacted performance simply wasn’t organised in an effective manner.

Technical SEO best practice

The lead development team at Hiyield rebuilt the site structure from the ground up adhering to Google protocols, making the site easily crawlable for search engines, more visible to them and made useful and relevant content more discoverable for end users using search engines to research holidays in Cornwall.

It was a rigorous process, ensuring all areas of technical SEO of the site were as they should be, also addressing and ensuring that the site performance was being accurately tracked. 

The results

105% growth in organic traffic versus the previous year

The site has delivered exceptional performance improvements for Visit Cornwall, actually performing better than the tourism and hospitality industry as whole.

Current trends suggest that UK (and international) searches for holiday related content are down 20% year on year, but Visit Cornwall’s organic traffic is up circa 105% year on year. Organic visit to the ‘accommodation search’ pages have benefitted from a 95% increase in organic search traffic too, meaning the site is driving highly relevant traffic in much greater volumes. This all helps to increase bookings across the county.

Our work with Visit Cornwall has provided a huge boost in traffic at a crucial time, whilst also increasing average position rankings across the board by over 4%. This increased visibility is driving overall performance, enabling the organisation to move forward and take steps to continue to optimise the website to convert this increased traffic into customers.

We can’t wait to help them to make further improvements to the site, with a live project to look at UX and make improvements and efficiencies there too.

Matt Ville asterisk

Let’s get started!

Great digital products aren’t just built, they’re co-created. Together, let’s breathe life into your idea, crafting solutions that stand out.