Expanding The Inn Collection Group’s Online Presence to Give Them the Edge in a Saturated Market

Having already established themselves as a key operator in the tourism industry in the north, The Inn Collection Group wanted to take things a step further and invest heavily in search engine optimisation.

Their main goal was to rank for non-branded keywords – such as ‘Berwick upon Tweed accommodation’ and ‘restaurants near Durham’ – so that potential customers, who weren’t specifically searching for an Inn Collection Group inn, could find them.

Widening their net of customer acquisition was a key feature of the brief.

Very soon, the Embryo team understood what was needed – three things: Firstly, we knew we would need to drive traffic to the site via search engines and relevant keywords. Secondly, we would need to supplement this first stage with engaging content that would help to increase bookings – the entire point of The Inn Collection Group’s online presence. Finally, we would need a clear strategy to split our resources across specific inns, ensuring that all the target locations would perform, as well as drive bookings and revenue.

These were the elements that would best prime the company’s website for success in an extremely competitive marketplace.

During the consultation phase, Embryo’s Mitchell and Charlie had meetings with Zoe and the team from The Inn Collection Group to establish the strategy, discover which inns’ websites were to be worked on, and understand how they wanted the inns to be presented – as inns with accommodation, not hotels.

This first stage was vital as it gave us the platform from which to apply our tried-and-tested methods of search engine optimisation and content marketing. From there, the Organic team – comprising SEO and Content Executives – worked together, with the former undergoing keyword research to find those terms that people were searching for when looking for accommodation.

Once these were found, the Organic team then split the monthly resource across 3 pre-selected inn websites and worked on adding fresh, optimised content to pages on those sites. This content was written with the help of AI-powered software that ensured the content we created, a, was consistent with The Inn Collection Group’s brand voice, and, b, featured all the ontologically relevant phrases that would help support the performance of the pages for the keywords that we were wanting to rank on page one for.

The content we created bolstered what was already there and was centred around increasing the amount of local content on the pages. This was to help them rank for those crucial, local key terms that were being searched by people looking to book accommodation with a business such as The Inn Collection Group. We included sections such as “Things to see and do in Berwick-Upon-Tweed” and expanded content to include more keywords and more relevant phrasing.

On the tech SEO side, Mitchell and the team underwent a comprehensive search engine optimisation audit, which helped boost the health score of the site from 36/100 to 71. These audits measure factors such as the use of internal links, page speed, and structure – all of which need to be optimised if Google is to quickly and comprehensively scan the site.

Our Performance

• Increased the number of keywords that The Inn Collection Group ranks for from 6,045 to 12,637, an increase of 6,592 (Jan 2021 vs Jan 2022).
• 2,222 keywords now rank on page one of Google, an increase of 1,105.
• 31% increase in page views for the website’s accommodation pages from September to December 2021 (Jan 2021 vs Jan 2022).
• Huge leaps in keyword rankings for tier-one keywords such as ‘accommodation in Durham England’ (up 43 places to position 57), ‘pubs in Durham’ (up 42 places to position 18), and ‘Seaton accommodation’ (up 41 places to position 33). All of which proves that content and SEO combined do dramatically improve rankings over time.
• Increased organic traffic to all of the Inn Collection Group’s inn websites to over 50,000 unique visitors a month.
• 60,000 monthly impressions in December 2021, which was an increase of 20,000 when compared with the same period in 2019 (before the impact of Covid-19).