Tourism Kingston’s Search Warrant tops Tripadvisor

On-page SEO savvy helped Tourism Kingston (visitkingston.ca) and its content win top ranks in Google search engine results — and even top TripAdvisor.

Background

The client: Tourism Kingston showcases and promotes all things cultural, cool, historical – and tasty in Kingston, Ontario through blog posts, attraction guides, listicles and more.

Industry: Leisure, travel and tourism

Audience: Holiday-goers and visitors to Kingston

The challenge: Tourism Kingston (visitkingston.ca) wanted its content to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) for easier discovery by folks seeking out a range of things, including “things to do in Kingston, Kingston Penitentiary Tours,” “Vegan Restaurants in Kingston,” and “Kingston Weddings.”

Why are higher search rankings important? The vast majority of users look at pages that appear within the first 10 results. So, when your page ranks within the first 10 results, clicks and views go up dramatically. It’s also a sign that Google sees your page as providing relevant, authoritative and high quality content that answers a user’s search query.

The execution: Good ‘old-fashioned’ SEO. What does that mean? Well, a few things actually. We worked on a total of 11 visitkingston.ca pages over the span of eight months. Here’s a quick peek at the optimization process we followed.

First, set about reducing and removing duplicate page content that was competing for the same keywords – i.e., “things to do in kingston” or “things to do in kingston ontario.”

Next, we added new, relevant keyword-rich content to boost each page’s relevance to Google, and provided additional content suggestions for blogs that the Tourism Kingston team could use to support their main pages.

In addition to keyword-rich content, we revisited and rewrote each page’s meta description tag, so that they now provide a more concise, easily-digestible description along with a compelling call-to-action.

Another key part of the process was improving each page’s internal linking structure. In other words, providing links to other relevant pages and external websites. This not only improves the user experience by giving folks more places to go and easier access to detailed info, but also boosts search engine rankings by making the page that much more authoritative and credible to Google.

Finally, we identified page performance issues – like slow load speeds – and provided several recommended fixes.

The results: So where did all these SEO optimization efforts land us? Well, first, we saw organic traffic growth in the form of clicks – from 3,011 in 2022 to 4,600 in 2023.

Increased search engine visibility also meant that impressions – or, the number of times a user sees a listing for your page in their search results – were also up from 165,934 in 2022 to 211,274 in 2023.

Another key improvement: The amount of organic traffic – people discovering visitkingston.ca content by searching the top 24 Kingston-related keywords – increased from 647 visits in 2022 to 1,858 visits in 2023.

What’s more – visitkingston.ca pages went from an overall search engine ranking of 6.6 to 5.2 for the top 24 Kingston-related keywords. When it comes to search ranks, a smaller number, closer to the top, is better.

Now, for the pièce de résistance

When it came to the keyword that generated the most organic traffic – “things to do in Kingston” – VisitKingston.ca ranked number one in the search results above the likes of TripAdvisor.

That’s a climb from sixth to top position in just a few short months from March to August 2023!

“We’ve benefitted from working with Search Warrant for several years now and, as tourism continues to recover from the effects of COVID-19, our SEO rankings have been a priority. Search Warrant works with us to identify priorities and provides expert, technical guidance working alongside our in-house team who develops content with SEO in mind and implements the recommended back-end changes. The results are impressive and are driving awareness, referrals, and bookings for our hotel, restaurant, and attraction partners.” says Alison Migneault, Director of Marketing and Communications at Tourism Kingston.

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If your site could benefit from more of the high-quality traffic that tends to arrive via strong organic search results for your most important keywords, we’d like to help — please drop us a line below.