924% increase in organic traffic across 4 highly competitive travel products

The solution

Our first priority was to stem the tide of declining organic traffic with some quick wins, whilst laying the groundwork for a longer-term strategy.

An on-page review of their key landing pages identified numerous low hanging fruit opportunities and new relevant keywords that could also be targeted using existing pages.

A competitor link analysis identified domains linking to competitors but not Lastminute.com, enabling the immediate production of a list of prospects to reach out to. Serving more than 10 million passengers a year, mentions of the Lastminute.com brand are plentiful online but many pieces of coverage didn’t include a link back to the website. To build momentum quickly, we reached out to publishers to turn these mentions into links, maximising coverage and strengthening the site’s authority. A widely successful activity, this project translated 59 mentions into links. Ensuring we didn’t compromise on quality for quantity, the majority of the reclaimed links were on websites with a Domain Authority over 50; this included Econsultancy, Recode and Huffington Post.

Our preliminary analysis also highlighted a need and opportunity for larger-scale content-marketing based link building targeting authoritative domains. We produced a series of creative content campaigns thematically related to the target URLs, using a range of formats, with the link value then funnelled through to the target pages with optimised internal links.

Our digital PR campaigns met with an excellent response, acquiring over 100 links from high-profile publications including Business Traveller, Bustle, The Matador Network, Daily Mail and The Sun.

Speaking about his design inspiration for the City Centre to Check In campaign, Senior Visual Designer Andrea Dona commented:

“As always, our process began with research into modes of data presentation. We settled on the radial bar chart, which allowed us to tightly control the scale and ensure that all of the data was clearly visible.

Effective use of a colour coding and a simple key then allowed us to achieve the full density of data that the brief demanded, condensing everything into a single, digestible chart. Achieving this with the brand’s limited palette was no small feat and required close communication and careful selection to keep the piece clear, on-brand and consistent with its summery holiday theme.

With the core data presentation fixed, we were then free to add additional flourishes, including location-specific facts and illustration work to ensure that the piece jumped out from the page.”