Case study of Elevation Vacations’ partnership with Gueststream

Problem

In the fall of 2011, Gueststream was tasked with improving the search engine rankings for Elevation Vacations, of Telluride, Colorado. Elevation Vacations (www.elevationvacations.com) is a leading  Telluride vacation rental management agency, specializing in luxury homes. In the months leading up to the engagement with Gueststream, Elevation Vacations had been working with a competing Colorado based hospitality marketing company, but weren’t getting the results they expected.

The challenge was to improve the search engine placement of Elevation Vacations, as they were being outranked by several competitors. As a result, Elevation Vacations was missing an opportunity to drive significant targeted traffic to their website. The solution would need to produce fast and lasting results. Gueststream completed preliminary keyword research by working with Elevation Vacations to determine the best and most important keywords to rank for in Telluride.  A small sample of these keywords includes:

• Telluride Lodging
• Telluride Vacation Rentals
• Telluride  Condos
• Telluride Home Rental
• Telluride Vacation Home
• And many more…

Solution

Gueststream used industry best practices, by using a variety of desirable keywords and focusing efforts to obtain a high Google ranking. This was achieved by using targeted link building and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Once a high ranking was achieved, an increase in traffic was guaranteed, and an increase in revenue followed. Gueststream used the followeding three components to ensure higher rankings.

1. Keyword Research/On-site Optimization – Keyword research is the first important task of any     search engine marketing campaign. It’s important to select not only relevant keywords, but keywords that will generate traffic.
2. Link Building/Social SEO – Search engines (namely Google) use sophisticated algorithms to determine were to rank a website based on hundreds of different factors. However, the incoming links pointing to your website count for about 70% of this equation.  Link building is the process of getting topically relevant websites or blogs to link to your website.
3. Track and Refine – This last step is important because in some cases a first page ranking isn’t achieved in the expected time (usually 90 days).  At this point, the initial efforts to achieve page one ranking are continued, or a long term strategy of maintenance is put in place.

Results and Benefits

Results for the Elevation Vacations marketing efforts are below. Gueststream has achieved great results inside of a few months and as Owner/COO Paul Zabel of Elevation Vacation says, “I’m very happy with the results so far!”

Below you’ll find screen shots of current rankings for Elevation Vacations.  In January 2012, Elevation Vacations had 16  keywords located on the first page, or Top 10 of Google. After the Gueststream optimization and link building work began to be picked up by Google, this number increased to 40 keywords in the Top 10!

Conclusion

Top 10 results for the selected keyword set nearly tripled.  Page 1 and Top 10 results will always result in more website traffic and increased online revenue.  While this study is a simplified summary of a larger more detailed plan, the results are a powerful example of how a focused approach to online marketing can produce relatively rapid results.