SEO and Design for Millington Travel
Description of company
Millington Travel is one of the UK’s longest established travel companies. Opening in Leicester in 1972, the travel agency has since gone on to open eight further branches in Leicestershire as well as two branches in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire.
The company has amassed a strong local reputation as the place to go for professional and qualified travel advice and is now able to serve more of its customers with branches positioned on high streets across three counties.
The travel agency specialises in long haul tailor-made holidays, luxury European and worldwide holidays and low-cost airfares.
The Challenge
After opening a series of new branches throughout Leicestershire, including Syston, Lutterworth, Loughborough, Melton Mowbray and Market Harborough, Millington Travel was looking to create a new website to showcase their offerings and capture more custom.
On the back of the website design work, our ongoing marketing for the travel agency revolved consisted of generating traffic to the website by improving the SEO performance of each branch location.
The Ideal Solution
Before work began on the website design, Ideal Marketing Company set about identifying who the desired audience is and their needs to help create customer personas – allowing us to build the website with the customer in mind.
The main objective within the website design was to encourage drop-ins, phone calls and emails to the branch locations. This was fulfilled by creating a layout and user experience that matched with the customer persona.
Updates to the website were made to reflect the desired keywords with the aim of improving Millington Travel’s position in SERPs. These updates involved technical fixes including adding H1s and H2s, meta descriptions, optimising images and content improvements involving amendments to the wording and location copy.
Furthermore, to increase the number of customer reviews (a factor to improve SERPs) for each branch on Google, a satisfaction survey was created to send to customers upon return from a holiday.
To accompany our work, Ideal Marketing Company acted as a strategic soundboard for further marketing efforts done my Millington themselves. This included reviewing Millington Travel’s social media accounts in an audit which provided recommendations and a strategy for the company to follow.
What was achieved
SEO efforts moved Millington Travel’s place into the top three search engine positions for desired local search terms. This positioned the company in front of and amongst national travel agents including Thomas Cook, Coop Travel and Virgin Holidays.
Goal conversions (visits to contact page, click on email links and clicks on telephone link) were consistently above 40% every quarter despite the seasonal nature of holidays that sees traffic to travel sites decrease annually from the peaks of the first quarter.
The amount of organic traffic coming to the site through the busy time also saw an increase on the year previous.
With a stable position for a range of local terms, we continued to look into national terms identified that Millington is placed well to compete for.
