Formby Hall dominates local search results across highly competitive leisure sector keywords.

Formby Hall Golf Resort and Spa is a new 4* boutique hotel north of Liverpool and home to the UK’s first National Residential PGA Academy. CL5 was chosen to maximise the impact of the launch campaign by implementing a six-month search marketing programme.

In 2008 Formby Hall completed a major £14m investment resulting in stunning new spa facilities, a brasserie restaurant, cocktail lounge and 62-room hotel, all complemented by an 18 hole championship golf course, a new 9-hole par 3 course and 26-bay floodlit driving range.

The sheer range and quality of the offer, supported by a first class website, suggested the search marketing campaign had great potential. Our challenge was to get visibility in a very competitive search environment and grow web sales referrals.

CL5’s first task was to use software and competitor research to quickly identify a target keyword list across the six key areas of the business. Keyword ranking in search pages is used to measure our campaign performance and the target list is used to optimise the page content for the search terms that potential customers in this market were actually using.

A structured programme of link research and link building was undertaken to boost the website’s popularity in Google. This included paid submission to high quality directories such as Yahoo! together with a range of industry-specific portals, plus large scale link submission to free search engines and high PageRank UK directories.

Technical improvements to the site’s readability in search engines were implemented and monitored using the webmaster tools utilities in Google, MSN and Yahoo! In addition, CL5’s expertise in interpreting site traffic data from Google Analytics was a useful source of information for our client to assess the performance of their ongoing marketing activity.

A range of small scale Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns in Google AdWords were devised to support specific sales activity in the hotel, to test market different keywords and to promote Formby Hall to new audiences. This data has proved invaluable to direct future advertising spend in hotel, spa and golf related markets.

Reputation counts in the hospitality industry. So in addition to our search marketing work, CL5 pro-actively monitored customer reviews from important referring sites such as Trip Advisor as well as ethically seeding forums and other review sites to help manage brand reputation.

The traffic figures speak for themselves, the number of unique visitors to the website rising 73%, non-brand keyword traffic rising 40%, average page views up 80% over the 6 month campaign and over 20 keyphrases gaining a top ten organic ranking.