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Case Study

About Thrifty Travler

Thrifty Travler has been striving to help its audience travel more for less. They post flight deals daily, run a paid subscription service for domestic and international flight deals, and share big news in the travel industry to keep readers in the know.

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Thrifty Travler’s Goals

Thrifty Travler wanted to clean its website’s structure. Before hiring us, the Thrifty Travler site had more than 3,000 URLs with no sections or organization. They also wanted to improve the keyword rankings for their most valuable articles.

The Challenge

With high-profile travel and credit card websites, Thrifty Travler continuously contests the industry's big names with much higher budgets and resources than itself.

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Our Strategy

We started with technical analysis that primarily focused on audits. They inform us about everything we need to know about the website we are working on.

These redirects were because Thrifty Travler is a travel news site, with new posts and URLs updated or added daily, this confirmed that we needed to add some structure and optimize authority.

Our Unique Method

  • We performed a complete website overhaul. This redesign was a massive task because of the number of pages, but it was essential so that Google could easily crawl Thrifty Travler.
  • Using Screaming Frog, we identified the starting location of all those redirected links on the website and replaced them with their final URLs in the redirect chains.
  • We added a Directory A and Directory B folder structure to organize the website. And we used the primary categories of Deals, Reviews, Comparisons, Guides, and News to keep the structure organized.
  • Thrifty Travler also used multiple affiliate links for credit card websites in their post and resources about using credit card miles for travel.
  • This helped with the overall structure of Thrifty Travler’s content organization. It also made it easier for them to inspect sections of their site and how each one was functioning with the new URL structure.
  • Unfortunately, Google can frown on affiliate links unless coded correctly as “no-follow” links. So to prevent the loss of authority Thrifty Travler had built with their content, we encouraged them to add a no-follow attribute to all their affiliate links.
  • Next, we turned our focus to optimizing the flow of the site’s page authority.

    The Results

    Thrifty Travler CEO, brought the same drive and passion to this project as he did to the creation of Thrifty Travler itself, knocking it out of the park when it came to results.

    Traffic Improvements

    The average daily search impressions in the campaign's first three months were about 275,000. In the most recent three months, the count stands at 900,000. These impressions increased to 7,000 average daily clicks.

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    Organic Keywords

    At the start of the campaign, Thrifty Travler had 4,989 keywords ranking in the Top 10 and 488 in the Top 3. By the end, they had 26,973 keywords ranking in the Top 10 and 5,687 in the Top 3. In addition, keyword rankings in the Top 3 Google search positions increased by 1,165%.

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    Notable Keyword Rankings

    "Google Flights"

    • Current Position: 2

    • Keyword Difficulty:59

    • Monthly Search Volume:7,480,000

    "Best Day to Book Flights"

    • Current Position: 1

    • Keyword Difficulty:37

    • Monthly Search Volume:12,100

    "How to Find Cheap Flights"

    • Current Position: 2

    • Keyword Difficulty:69

    • Monthly Search Volume:14,800

    Before working with us, Thrifty Travler’s Google Flights page could not break onto the first page of search results. Now, it’s ranked second only after the Google Flights website.

    From Jan.1, 2021, to Nov. 30, 2021, the Thrifty Travler Google Flights page was responsible for 15,428 goal completions in Google Analytics.

    "Google Flights Search Anywhere"

    • Current Position: 2

    • Keyword Difficulty:69

    • Monthly Search Volume:14,800

    "Southwest Low Fare Calendar"

    • Current Position: 2

    • Keyword Difficulty:69

    • Monthly Search Volume:14,800

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