Search-optimised Shopify site delivers 2-fold traffic increase for Master Travel
The Master Travel company provide bespoke package trips for people with particular study interests; examples include healthcare, education, music and veterinary study tours.
For years everything was organised through magazine publicity, email newsletters, survey forms, and phone calls.
All their payments were managed over the phone, involving two or three phone calls per transaction. One for the deposit, one when the full payment was due, and one for any bolt-on trip perks like a double room, or additional tour.
3B suggested Shopify given the aggressive timeline and budget, plus the need for a responsive mobile site with an e-commerce emphasis.
With an in-house training session the Master Travel team were up to speed with the admin side of things within hours, adding new products, migrating old content, understanding the Shopify CRM, taking new email subscribers on, using complex Shopify add-ons, you name it.
They knew they didn't need to reinvent themselves and "go full-digital" because many of their clients still find phone conversations more secure than the internet because there's a real person on the other end.
To this end we placed a prominent banner on every page prompting every viewer to call a landline if they had any questions about a tour, without compromising on the technical ability of the Shopify site to process payments and personal information safely and securely.
It is incredibly satisfying when a product perfectly suits the clients needs, but all the more so when it delivers greater business success!
Year on year inbound traffic has grown by a massive 91%.
Courses like Early Years Education in Finland & Sweden have received over 4000 views in the 118 days since launch, equating to 35 views on average each day. This is because we designed their pages to be optimised for search with strong titles, headings and url's including the key words their target market were using to search for trips.
Incredibly, the effect of these optimised trip-specific landing pages, was the reduction of the proportion of all page views on the homepage by half, while increasing the total number of page views to the homepage by 40%.
This means more people finding the information they need directly from search results, or generally being able to find what they needed without going to the homepage. This could be down to the rich built-in search suggestion box we have on the site, and the internal search results pages.
We took best practice steps on their Google analytics account to filter out all the spam and ghost referrers (more on that here), and the IP addresses of our and their offices, which usually reduces the number of page views and sessions visible on the account. Clearly that didn't happen here!
Overall the client couldn't be happier with the overwhelming success of this project which came in on-time, under budget, and consistently delivers over expectations!
