SEO Consultancy with Visit Wales

Written by Adam Stafford - 14.08.07

Everyone at Fresh Egg is naturally delighted to have recently been hired by Visit Wales, the Welsh Tourist board, to help promote tourism in Wales. Adam Stafford and I were even more delighted that a part of our work with Visit Wales is in providing Search Engine Marketing Consultancy, because this means we get to spend more time visiting this lovely part of the world.

Driving to Wales took us through some heavy rain as we passed through Somerset, but that didn’t dampen our enthusiasm in the least. Wales is such a beautiful and unspoiled country, that rain is just another part of experiencing the majestic grandeur of nature that every view presents. As it turned out, the rain cleared before we crossed the border, and a gorgeous sunset was the setting as we arrived at our hotel. We’d decided to stay overnight, ostensibly so we’d be fresh for the meeting and not have to drive down too early in the morning. Really though, I think it was more the opportunity to spend an extra night in Wales that made that decision.

This wasn’t just a pleasure trip, of course. SEO consulting is a valuable and important business offering. For this client, and several others, the SEO consultancy is a part of a wider package of services, but is the most strategic one, helping the whole lot to work more holistically and effectively.

The Consultancy had already begun much earlier, back in our Worthing offices, with the extensive research that we use to gain a full understanding of each client, their market, their objectives, their resources, etc. This is a lot like a full SWOT analysis, where we examine all the factors of the existing situation and resources before planning a strategy that uses all of this information to best effect.

The purpose of the on-site consultancy is to really hammer out all of the potential issues, and ensure in a face-to-face meeting that we all understand one another, understand what we are all working to achieve, and how we intend to achieve it. Getting both the SMART objectives and the metrics that can measure performance in place most effectively and efficiently. It is all part of becoming an effective team with our clients.

We talked at length about improving visitor engagement with the website as well as increasing search visibility, which are both practical objectives in line with their goal to build (brand) awareness. We discussed the breadth of content, explaining the ‘Long Tail’ phenomenon, and the way that individuals search and browse for things in a quite individualistic way. We discussed rationalising the flow of a visit from site to site across the many different tourism sites in Wales, such as those promoting certain regions, certain activities, etc.

We discussed the range of hard metrics that could be used to indicate and measure performance, and the various actions that visitors might take that could be regarded as a successful conversion or mini-conversion. Navigating to particular deep content could be an indicator of some success, but merely arriving at those pages from search might not unless the site continued to engage and hold attention. Requesting or downloading brochures was certainly a success, as was submitting an email subscription. As we add blogs later, subscription to the RSS feed(s) will be another desirable conversion activity.

It is an exciting and rich project, filled with huge potential, and we hopefully managed to infectiously spread some of our enthusiastic anticipation about this opportunity to our clients. That’s the part I love most about consultancy. We felt it was a highly successful meeting, and filled us with ideas for the final stage of this consultancy – my detailed report.

However, once out of the meeting, we couldn’t resist the gorgeous weather, and the chance to drive through the beautiful Welsh countryside.

We turned the car North and headed towards the Brecon Beacons and the wonderful atmosphere of Hay-on-Wye.

The hills (and mountains) of Wales are alive with character and history. They have this amazing feeling of strength and endurance which, I’m personally certain, is why those traits are often so strong in the Welsh people. The lush green forests covering most of the hillsides are beautiful to me – although I did find myself thinking what a great place this would be for paintball games.

As for the lovely town of Hay-on-Wye itself, apart from having the highest proportion of bookshops I’ve ever seen, and apart from offering us a superb place to have lunch (fresh Welsh lamb, naturally), I’ll let the pictures say it all.