Aruba.com

Boosting tourism with an award-winning organic search strategy

During the pandemic, the travel industry was turned upside down. This was evident in our physical world—where airports looked like ghost towns compared to their previous capacities—and the digital world as online searches for travel and holiday destinations dropped. The term “Aruba,” once searched thousands of times daily, saw online searches dwindle to only a handful per week.

Aruba.com wanted to change this, so with the help of DEPT®, we set out to get people dreaming of and searching for the destination island again.

One Happy Island

Aruba, also known as One Happy Island, guarantees joy for its visitors through beautiful white beaches, crystal-clear blue sea, warm temperatures, and cheerful culture. Through its digital presence, Aruba.com proudly showcases the island’s beauty and aims to demonstrate to people worldwide why this island is the ultimate holiday destination.

Tourism is a crucial source of income for the island, and the pandemic-driven decrease in visitors resulted in a steep loss of revenue from this industry. As a consequence, Aruba.com faced a reduced budget for destination marketing, including paid media. Simultaneously, uncertainty among Aruba.com’s target audience caused changes in online search behavior, leaving the brand and DEPT® with a challenge: How do you attract visitors to the vacation-based website and ultimately draw travelers to the island during such an uncertain time?

New priorities

To begin, we needed to re-evaluate the priorities of Aruba.com and determine where we could continue to make an impact digitally until the travel industry resumed some normalcy. Together, we deemed that travel bookings were not currently the top priority and turned the focus to growing a pipeline of traffic and visitor interest through Search Engine Optimization.

This meant scaling back paid campaigns and targeting current goals via a smart organic search strategy. To keep pace with and stay ahead of pandemic-related developments in the tourism industry, we laid out two new objectives:

Minimizing the decline in website traffic
Increasing the website’s top 10 rankings

Our approach

Smart SEO strategy

DEPT® and Aruba.com were not strangers when collaborating on content strategies. Prior to the pandemic, we worked together to identify the site’s content gaps and created a library of meaningful mid- and upper-funnel content. But when the world turned upside down, we needed to ensure our content strategy and activities reflected consumers’ current needs and behavior.

Through research on pandemics and user online behavior during epidemics, we developed strategic pandemic predictions with a practical timeline to drive the plans for our SEO efforts.

In the first phase of the timeline, we determined that people would primarily seek factual information. So, we started by analyzing and optimizing existing Traveler Health pages created by the Aruba Tourism Authority (ATA). Because most keyword research tools did not have the most up-to-date data on pandemic-related searches, we collaborated with ATA to set up various dashboards to monitor search behavior.

These dashboards collect and anonymize travel data (e.g., bookings, traffic, impressions) from DEPT® clients in the travel industry. This allowed us to compare the recovery threshold based on historical data and help predict a potential resurgence of interest in travel.

Profiting from lower competition

Because of the pandemic’s impact across most travel and tourism, we saw an opportunity to capitalize on the decline of competition on the search engine result page (SERP). To take advantage of this opening, we worked with Aruba.com to create new and optimize existing pages—25 in total—based on our content gap analysis.

We added new copy to optimize the existing pages and inserted additional keywords that showed a higher search volume in the past period. We also created net-new pages for topics in high demand based on recent search queries, such as car rental in Aruba, island drinking water, and hotel and resort information.

A solid technical base

We had to create an SEO-proof technical base to ensure that the Traveler Health pages and new content pages would perform well. Implementing an FAQ markup for 21 pages ensured that search engines would easily find frequently asked questions and answers across the site.

Within three weeks of implementation, these efforts resulted in 25K impressions.

During this phase, we noticed some British Traveler Health pagers weren’t performing. By adding hreflang tags, we led visitors to the correct landing pages, leading to a significant boost in clicks and impressions.