Happy Clients
The Carlton Inn Midway hotel in Chicago was experiencing a down-turn in business due to of the challenging economy and due to the shift in how customers made hotel reservations. Just a few years back their customers primarily found them through word-of-mouth, street visibility, the phone book, and through the AAA travel guide. They established a large customer base, and always took pride in exceeding their customer’s expectations.
A few years ago the Internet began to become a popular way for consumers to do their research and purchasing, and the large hotel chains quickly dominated search engine results. Carlton become lost on page 4 of Google’s results for its most relevant keywords. On page 4, the hotel’s website got very few visitors and brought in almost no new customers. The Carlton Inn Midway was even paying a website developer a monthly SEO fee without seeing any positive results.
Kenneth Lewis & Associates began with a remake of their dated website, and for three other affiliated hotel properties. The redesigned site brought vivid imagery, an abundance of quality information and content, as well as easy access to the reservation systems. Then, in a few short months of SEO work, our team brought the practically invisible website of the Carlton to the top of Google search results.
One of the major determinants of success in the search engines is one’s perceived popularity. Popularity is assigned to each site, and each page of the site, based upon how many in-bound links point to the page, and based upon the popularity of the site that is providing the link. Google indexes the new links at best within a few days but often not for weeks or months from their creation.
Here is the “back-link” graph for this client’s site, with the green mark indicating when Kenneth Lewis & Associates took over the SEO efforts of the Carlton:
One can see that the website designer who charged the Carlton a monthly Search Engine Optimization fee for years created few, if any, back-links. Many of the back-links on the chart up until our involvement were the natural flow of other webmasters, directories, and guest talk. Our SEO began in mid-January 2010 for the Carlton, and we worked on a five month campaign. Even after the campaign concluded, new back links were “discovered” by the search engine’s robots for months. (Back-links take some time for Google to discover).
Upon completion of the Search Engine Optimization and back-link building campaign for this client, search engines began to list the Carlton at the top of their results for many keywords, including the vital keyword “Midway hotels”:
The top result is a paid advertisement by Expedia. Expedia is paying a few dollars per click to try to get this traffic. At the top of the “organic” search engine results is the Carlton Inn Midway. In this case, it not only has position #1, but also has position #2, for a page we created to promote the fact that the hotel offers free parking in Chicago.
This is a tremendous feat given that our competitors are the “big boys” of the industry, including Marriott, Hampton Inn, and Best Western, as well as the big TPIs like Expedia, hotels.com, and TripAdvisor. For an independent hotel to get the #1 position for the search term “Midway Hotels” is simply spectacular, and is an indication of our team’s acumen, intelligence, know-how, and dedication.
The next search result is for the keywords “McCormick Place hotels.” If you know anything about how many great hotels in downtown Chicago are fighting for McCormick Place business, the following results would be unexpected of a simple, independent, no-thrills, cheap Chicago hotel (but, great customer service) like the Carlton Inn Midway:
The second “organic” result is the Carlton Inn Midway- even before the Hyatt that is actually part of the McCormick Place campus. When a searcher clicks on this organic result there is no cost to the hotel client.
As the Carlton Inn Midway gained in online presence, the hotel’s occupancy level skyrocketed to levels it hadn’t seen since before the recession.
And, as the occupancy levels increased, so did the revenues:
The causality is clear: a stronger online presence leads to more conversions, revenues and profitability.
We in the marketing business are at the mercy of our budgets. When we are given sufficient budgets, we deliver huge results. When the budgets aren’t plentiful, the man-hours aren’t either. We then have to rely upon ingenuity to compete with the competitors who have committed to spending on marketing. This client chose to spend relatively heavily for a while, and the results showed. Now they are spending much less, and their big competitors are giving them a run for their money. In the end, what you put into it is what you get out of it. Stellar results cannot come from low budgets. As they say, “you get what you pay for.”
Want to see your business listed here, in a few months, as our next success story? Contact us, today.
Disclaimer: the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, and results differ based upon your browser, system, and other factors. While our SEO successes for this client are evident everyday, the actual search result placement bounces around a bit. But, it bounces around at the top- which is what matters to the client. In the world of search engines, there is no sticking your pole in the ground at the #1 position and claiming it as yours. It is a constant effort, on our part, to keep our client as a contender for the title of #1.
