Case Study - Villaway

From zero visibility to industry-leading 12,000 organic monthly visitors.

Check out how we built up a luxury rental marketplace to drive hundreds of qualified leads per day.

Overview

Client: Villaway

Problem: Zero visibility in organic search after platform launch in 2016.

Solution: Clean up technical issues of the custom CMS and employ an aggressive brand awareness digital PR strategy featuring content placement & link acquisition to key destination pages.

Services: Digital strategy, content marketing, technical SEO, enterprise SEO, PPC management.

Results: Organic traffic grew from zero organic visitors to over 12,000 in 2 years. The site’s key pages rank for hundreds of money keywords, driving several hundred relevant warm leads per month. Average value of each lead is four figures.

Campaign

Villaway is a Los Angeles-based startup offering luxury travelers the largest variety of villa rentals in all the key vacation destinations in the world. We were approached several months after the platform’s launch to create a long-term growth strategy to grow the site from zero visibility in search results.

Our approach for the campaign was based around organic growth as well as some PPC support to help target key markets. With a focus on key destinations that drove the most value, our content and digital outreach made up the core of our proposed organic growth strategy.

Research & Strategy Setting

Our team began by identifying numerous technical SEO fixes for the custom CMS platform upon which the site was built. As part of our on-page audit, we also identified key improvement opportunities for copy optimization.

Most importantly, we researched and studied existing competitors for each target market. After thoroughly analyzing existing search results for things such as consumer search trends and understanding why Google preferred top-ranking competitors’ sites, we put together a 12-month and a 24-month roadmap for successful growth.

Outstanding Results

Our campaign began in early 2017. True to our originally estimated timelines, the site’s organic traffic grew from zero to over 3,000 visitors in less than a year. Another year later, the site was generating over 12,000 organic visitors and hundreds of relevant leads monthly. Key highlights of this campaign’s success:

Monthly organic traffic grew from 0 organic visitors in January 2017 to over 12,000 organic visitors in January of 2019.
The site holds page 1 rankings for over 2,000 keywords, including top-3 rankings for over 500 keywords.
The PPC value of the site’s organic traffic is over $31,000 and growing. This is how much it would cost to generate the same amount of visitors using Google Ads.

“AMG has taken us from being unlisted in the search results to top 10 in Google search for our top destinations which include Los Angeles, Mexico, Hawaii, and more.”

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Steve Banning

Director of Marketing