The Background
North Star Cruises Australia is the Kimberley’s longest established adventure-cruise operator, having provided unique cruise options since 1987. The company has won both state and national tourism awards, is an undisputed market leader and offers a suite of itineraries for the most discerning adventurer.
Late in 2002, the company needed to redevelop its website so as to include additional cruises and lift the class of presentation in keeping with the class of product it was presenting. It needed to do this in such a way that the technology of the page design did not get in the way of convenient access of relevant cruise information via search results from a global audiance. To this end, WCR Internet Marketing, a specialist search engine optimisation company, was employed to work with their developer of choice, Clue Design, to make sure that all pages were 'search engine friendly' as built from the ground up.
The Challenge
Apart from the requirement of search engine friendly pages, it was important to make sure that the pages targeted well the right market, the specialist luxury adventure/wilderness cruise market, and that specific search terms found specific relevant pages on the site, rather on relying solely on presenting the home page. For example, it was noted that in the past the site was typically found with a narrow group of keywords related to the business name or the name of the cruiser, a group of less than 50 keywords tied to the home page in particular. If was felt that the old site was only well targeted to those searchers already introduced or familiar with the product in some way. In particular, the surge in visitors during the airing of a Michael Douglas or Animal Planet documentary featuring the cruise was hiding the fact that many more had failed to find the site because they had failed to remember the name of the company or the boat, but remembered location and other unique keywords related to the product or the documentary. A more diverse range of keywords, including multiple location qualifiers were required.
It was also extremely important to create a strong brand awareness and consistancy of message in the Internet space. The extremely competitive tourism sector, especially the cruise segment which shows over 9 million result listings for 'cruises' on Google alone, created a great challenge to the staff at WCR.
The Solution
Before the new page design, WCR did a comprehensive keyword analysis related to the cruise industry, and weighted the keywords according to relevance to target market and competition online. As the content was built, the top keywords were then matched to relevant content, making sure that a maximum number of pages were involved, maximising the chance of good rankings for each page, as page titles and so on were carefully worked out. Once the content was finalised, each page was checked to make sure that they all had custom designed title and meta tags and that they worked well with the text content and the source code was short, clean and crawlable the typical search engine spiders.
Of course, the primary high demand keywords like australian cruises, cruises australia, wilderness cruises australia, kimberley cruises, luxury cruises and the branded keywords like True North cruises and North Star cruises had to be lifted to the first page of organic search results. One hundred other keyword phrases had to be specifically identified and targeted moving forward on a Web Marketing Plan. The plan needed to be flexible so that new keywords, such as Papua and New Guinea (PNG) cruises and south pacific cruises, could be added as the products expanded.
Once the site went live, a PPC Ad campaign was devised, specifically to target a documentary that was due to show in America on Animal Planet in June 2003. Thereafter, a pilot PPC campaign was devised to gain market feedback on the use and price of specific keywords and to judge consumer behaviour to the new site. The cost of this pilot was absorbed in the monthly marketing fee.
The Results
In the second month of the new site launch, the visitor numbers increased by about 50%, and in the following month a further 50%. In the 6 months after launch the monthly visitors increased by more than 250% over the previous site. During that time, the number of search engine visitors grew by 10 fold, and the number of distinct keyword phrases increased from less than 100 to over 1,800! The five primary keyword phrases went to page 1 of Google. Online enquires and bookings increased significantly.
The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet documentary generated a surge in visitor numbers in the days surrounding showings in June 2003, despite the fact that the search engines had not had the chance to index all the new pages of the new site because of the timing of the site launch. The Google Adwords PPC campaign was ideal to target a specific campaign at short notice and the information gained proved useful in subsequent periods of tv documentary exposure..
Where to Since
WCR intoduced comprehensive e-commerce tracking of all PPC campaigns and search engine keywords via our unique client-side statistics system in 2004.
The success of North Star Cruises Kimberley Wilderness cruise has led to the recent announcement of a new cruiser. The luxury exploration vessel will be launched in time for the 2005 cruise season and, at a cost of $12 million, will represent the largest ever single investment in Western Australia’s marine tourism industry. This will spawn an all new improved website in February 2005 and WCR will be responsible for optimising and marketing it online.
