SEO-Content: The Secret Weapon for Marketing in a Downturn

TESTIMONIAL

“High quality content is at the heart of our digital marketing strategy. Whilst our hotels were closed to leisure travel, we looked forward to the time we could welcome guests back through our doors and took the opportunity to invest in fresh SEO content, highly relevant for the predicted post-lockdown domestic travel surge. Our content projects with Wolfgang helped ensure Maldron Hotels were top of search and top of mind for the summer of staycations, delivering record bookings through our websites.”

Allan Myhill – Group Digital Marketing Manager

CHANNELS

SEO-Content

WOLFGANG DIGEST

Unlike many in the hospitality industry, the Maldron Hotel group continued to invest in SEO-Content during the pandemic to steal a march on competitors who had paused digital marketing activity.

BUSINESS GROWTH

Organic bookings up 31% YoY (2021 vs 2020)

Organic revenue up 47% YoY (2021 vs 2020)

THE CHALLENGE

When the coronavirus pandemic reached the UK and Ireland in Q1 of 2020, the travel and hospitality industries were hit particularly hard. Travel restrictions put a stop to the vast majority of foreign tourism, while lockdowns ensured that locals couldn’t avail of hotel services such as spas and restaurants. The industry had two options when it came to their marketing: switch off spends and wait it out, or invest to win the long game.

OUR STRATEGY

Maldron phone screenshot

It’s widely accepted that there’s no better way to invest for the long-term than in SEO & Content. When travel demand crashed to a devastating zero in March 2020, as the dust settled, forward-looking marketers saw the opportunity to invest in SEO-Content. Maldron Hotels were one of few who did.

Over the course of the pandemic, the Maldron and Wolfgang teams worked tirelessly on customer-first, Content Relevancy projects across 22 Maldron hotels, designed to better target queries for each hotel’s primary target audience (e.g. Families vs Business travelers) and capture new high value long-tail queries, such as ‘hotels near [attraction]’.

By nature, SEO-Content can’t simply be ‘switched on’ and be effective when restrictions lift, so investing during the lockdown was the perfect time to create thoughtful, strategic SEO-Content that would be ready and waiting to serve search intent at exactly the right moment.

INNOVATION USED

Some opportunistic strategies that proved highly effective during this period included:

SEO-Content to answer queries around the ‘new normal’ such as outdoor dining, hotel safety measures etc., with a focus on FAQs to win Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ search results.
‘Ultimate Guide’ content for key locations to serve the anticipated growth in ‘local tourism’; ‘staycationers’ and family group bookings.
Audited and scrutinised competitors’ rankings for Maldron’s most important search queries and rolled out a targeted optimisation strategy to win back the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

BUSINESS GROWTH

While year on year comparisons during the pandemic come with caveats, the summers of 2020 and 2021 were actually quite similar in that both were relatively restriction-free domestically.

Comparing June-Aug 2021 vs 2020, Maldron Hotels enjoyed significant gains in the performance of their organic channel as a result of the continuous work carried out over the lockdown periods.

Overall organic bookings increased 31% overall while revenue increased 47%.

There were even significant gains in 2021 vs 2019 (pre-pandemic), with organic bookings for Maldron Hotel Shandon Cork City up 128% (2021 vs 2019), bookings for Maldron Hotel South Mall Cork City up 102% and bookings for Maldron Hotel Sandy Road Galway up 318%.

+47%

YoY Organic Growth

+31%

YoY Organic Bookings

SEO-Content: The Secret Weapon For Marketing in a Downturn

How Maldron Hotels used pandemic time to win the re-opening period

TESTIMONIAL

CHANNELS

WOLFGANG DIGEST

BUSINESS GROWTH

THE CHALLENGE

OUR STRATEGY

INNOVATION USED

BUSINESS GROWTH