How iProspect boosted SEO traffic for Aer Lingus during a tough time for airlines
iProspect won in the ‘Travel and Tourism’ category at The Drum Awards for Search 2022 with its work on improving SEO traffic for Aer Lingus. Here, we find out more about what went into this successful project.
Aer Lingus needed a boost to its SEO over the pandemic
Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, is considered to be a challenger brand in the European and North American markets. There’s lots of room to grow and expand its customer base – especially through organic channels.
The brief
The pandemic had proven to be challenging for aviation. The industry, with declining revenue in 2020, saw many major brands forced to cut costs, including spend on any digital activities.
Aer Lingus was different. The brand saw this as an opportunity to double down on SEO to supercharge its organic visibility and be ready when demand returned.
iProspect Ireland was tasked with growing the organic traffic and visibility through organic content and technical improvements on the website. The key objective was to boost SEO traffic in areas where Aer Lingus had previously very little or no visibility. By doing this it aimed to deliver record-breaking performance for Aer Lingus and put it on the map alongside other major players including Ryanair, Skyscanner or Kayak in organic Google.
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The idea
iProspect created a strategy to improve organic visibility in three main markets: Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The campaign we designed was based on the company’s priorities and a search volume-driven approach. We focused on long-tail searches for the most profitable and the most-demanded destinations Aer Lingus provided to customers.
The agency used search volume and trend data to identify that searchers wanted more information and to understand flight information, promotions, the locations, to and from the airport travel, scale of the airport and internal navigation of it, and how connected the location is to others. With this information it was now in a position to begin creating on-page copy, which would be more carefully optimized and focused on delivering high value for our users.
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The results
Targets for the project were high as market research conducted by Aer Lingus indicated that demand would be returning due to positive changes with travel restrictions. What was achieved with the project was an unrecognizable change to organic visibility. The optimization project was very successful and ranking visibility went through the roof.
There was an increase in organic traffic for a set period by 50%. Sessions increased by 138.17%, which equates to approximately 1.75m extra sessions. Increase in keyword ranking visibility went up by 25%, and the average ranking for this set of pages moved from 7.29 to 1.82 in Google Search Console.
This project was a winner at The Drum Awards for Search 2022. Find out which of The Drum Awards are currently open for entry.