How a Travel Guide Site Grew Traffic by 600% in 6 Months
https://www.visitacity.com/
Stats
28.5K to 199.7K Monthly Visits
Industry
Travel & Tourism
Niche
Travel Guide
Reporting Date
September 2024
Visit A City is a popular online platform for travelers. It provides travel guides that are adjustable, accessible offline, and based on real plans created by other travelers.
Users can also download the Visit A City app to plan and view itineraries.
While its focus on unique travel experiences is impressive, it's the website's recent organic traffic that caught our eye at AIOSEO.
Visit A City catapulted traffic from 28.5K to 199.7K monthly visits in a mere 6 months. That’s an incredible 600% growth.
In this SEO case study, we'll explore the growth strategies behind Visit A City's newfound organic success. You'll also learn tips and tools for replicating these strategies on your website.
In This Article
The Catalyst: How Visit A City Reached 199.7K Monthly Visits
1. Massive Content Expansion: 10x Increase in Pages
Between March and September 2024, Visit A City invested significant efforts into its content creation. The website went from a humble 1.6K pages to over 16K URLs during these months.
That’s an impressive tenfold increase in a relatively short amount of time.
New content touched nearly every corner of the website.
From new destinations to attractions and activities, content is overflowing with city must-sees and fresh itineraries.
The effect on Visit A City’s rankings was dramatic.
Keyword rankings exploded from 44.6K in March to 299.5K by September.
In addition to new rankings, this fresh content had an interesting effect on Visit A City’s traffic.
Previously, the majority of the platform’s traffic was branded (a whopping 93%). This means its traffic was largely coming from branded queries in search engines.
Note: Branded keywords are search queries tied to a specific brand, product, or service. For example, “apple computer” or “iphone” are both branded searches.
Branded traffic is great—when your audience knows your name—but it has limitations.
One of the biggest drawbacks is that new users can’t find you because they don’t know you exist yet.
That’s why you’ll see many websites using a mix of branded and non-branded keywords in their content optimizations.
As the name suggests, non-branded keywords are not tied to a specific brand.
These keywords typically have higher search volumes because they’re more generic. This means there’s more traffic to be won from them than branded keywords.
For Visit A City, the new content sparked a rapid decline in branded traffic.
By September, branded traffic had fallen to a mere 6%.
Conversely, this change explains why Visit A City experienced a rapid growth in organic traffic.
Now that it’s ranking for more non-branded keywords, it has greater visibility in search engines.
This means 94% of its traffic is now unbranded.
Why this matters:
While branded traffic is valuable, it limits your reach to existing customers.
By aggressively expanding content and targeting more non-branded keywords, Visit A City successfully diversified its traffic sources.
This shift has made the platform more discoverable to new audiences, driving significant organic growth and reducing reliance on branded searches.
Website owners take note: A well-executed content strategy can be a powerful tool for increasing visibility and attracting new customers.
How to find content ideas & non-branded keywords:
A successful content strategy starts with keyword research.
By finding the keywords your audience uses in search engines, you can create content that addresses their needs and interests.
It will also guide your content optimization efforts for maximum visibility on the SERP.
Here’s a brief overview of how to do keyword research for non-branded keywords:
- Select a keyword research tool.
- Identify a non-branded focus keyword.
- Find related keywords.
- Decipher search intent.
- Understand keyword difficulty.
- Optimize your content with your non-branded keywords.
Tools for non-branded keyword research:
Did you know you can perform keyword research in WordPress?
The All In One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin connects with your Semrush account to serve keyword ideas directly in the WordPress editor.
After setting the focus keyword in your post or page, select Get Additional Keyphrases.
The plugin will generate additional keywords from Semrush and serve them to you in WordPress.
Many, if not all, keywords will be unbranded.
Next, let’s see how Visit A City uses images in its new content to stand out in search results.
2. Images: Boosting Search Visibility One Result at a Time
In addition to the new content on the website, Visit A City has vastly expanded its image offerings.
Every page is full of sightseeing and attraction ideas, and a photo is included in each recommendation.
Take the Oslo Attractions page, for example.
The first attraction is the Akershus Castle and Fortress, and Visit A City showcases a picture of it.
What’s interesting about this is that users see this same image when searching “oslo attractions” in Google.
This is called a rich snippet.
Rich snippets have higher clickthrough rates (CTR) than standard search listings, making them extremely valuable for your website.
And the above example is just one of many image snippets for Visit A City.
In September, it ranked for over 25.8K keywords with images.
So, how’d they do it?
Visit A City uses a few image SEO best practices to ensure its graphics make it onto the SERP, including:
- Optimizing image title tags with the focus keyword.
- Sending strong on-page SEO signals.
- Using anchor text and internal links to help search engines understand the content of the page.
Overall, these optimizations make it easier for search engines to decipher images’ content and serve them in relevant search results.
Why this matters:
SEO statistics reveal that rich snippets get 58% of all clicks.
This is significantly higher than standard, non-rich results, which have a 41% CTR.
In addition to more clicks and traffic to your site, image SEO is important for accessibility.
Visually impaired users rely on screen readers to understand a web page’s content. And since screen readers can’t “see” an image, they depend on alt text to describe the image and read it aloud to the user.
That’s why it’s critical to think of all your users when optimizing images.
How to do image SEO:
Visit A City has some basic image optimizations on its site, but there’s room for improvement.
I’d like to see them include the following optimizations on their website:
- Write keyword-optimized alt text that accurately describes the image.
- Include your primary keyword in the image file name.
- Add captions when it’s helpful to your audience.
- Implement schema markup for search engines.
If you follow the above recommendations and add title tags like Visit A City, you, too, can start ranking with image snippets on the SERP.
Tools for image SEO:
Image optimizations can be repetitive, but they’re critical for your website’s SEO.
Thankfully, there are tools that streamline the process.
AIOSEO’s Image SEO tool allows you to automate certain tasks like writing image titles or alt text.
The screenshot below demonstrates how you can customize variables using smart tags to generate alt tags automatically.
This saves you valuable time and ensures no image alt tag is forgotten.
Now, let’s see how Visit A City optimizes its content to rank in Google’s People Also Ask section.
3. Comprehensive Content: One-Stop-Shop for User Questions
Visit A City offers users concise yet comprehensive overviews of cities' top attractions.
When exploring a specific attraction, users can find detailed information, including highlights, practical tips, and traveler ratings.
In the example below, we see details about Place du Tertre, a popular tourist spot in Paris, France.
This rich content not only enhances the user experience on the Visit A City website but also boosts its search engine rankings.
Many of these attraction details are featured in Google's People Also Ask (PAA) section, which offers users related questions to their search.
In the screenshot below, we see how Google pulled some of the body copy from the earlier Place du Tertre page and featured Visit A City in the PAA box.
PAA rankings are a new SERP feature for Visit A City.
Earlier in the year, they didn’t have any.
By September, they boast an impressive 965 rankings in Google’s People Also Ask.
This growth demonstrates Visit A City’s ability to provide valuable and relevant answers to travelers' queries, which Google rewards by highlighting them in the PAA box.
Why this matters:
Being featured in Google's People Also Ask section is a powerful way to increase visibility and attract qualified traffic.
By providing comprehensive and informative content, Visit A City has successfully positioned itself as a go-to resource for travelers seeking answers to their most pressing questions.
This dominance in the PAA box drives organic traffic while reinforcing their authority and expertise in the travel industry.
How to rank in Google People Also Ask:
This tutorial outlines how to rank in the PAA section of the SERP.
Here’s a brief overview of the process:
- Use an SEO tool.
- Perform keyword research.
- Write high-quality content.
- Include FAQs.
- Implement FAQ schema.
Tools for PAA rankings:
FAQs are one of the most effective ways to rank in Google’s People Also Ask. Their question-answer format lends itself naturally to PAA rankings.
We recommend using an FAQ plugin, like AIOSEO, to include them in your content.
What’s unique about using an FAQ plugin is that it will add schema markup automatically for you.
This means you don’t have to work with JSON-LD or HTML code.
For example, with AIOSEO, you just have to locate the FAQ block in the WordPress editor.
After writing your question and answer, the plugin will implement FAQ schema for search engines.
Overall, it’s very easy to use and increases the likelihood of PAA rankings on the SERP.
Standout SEO Wins
Before we conclude, there’s a final SEO technique worth highlighting at visitacity.com:
Internal Linking Strategy Supports Keyword Optimizations
Visit A City excels at internal linking. They take advantage of each opportunity to link to one of their other pages—when it’s natural, relevant, and genuinely valuable to the user.
This approach avoids excessive internal linking and keeps users exploring the site through related content.
In addition to including internal links, it’s how Visit A City writes the anchor text that is equally impressive.
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link. It acts like a preview of what users can expect to find when they click the link.
That’s why it’s important for it to accurately reflect the content.
Visit A City uses the linked content’s SEO keyword within the anchor text to support the page’s keyword optimizations.
In turn, this helps search engines understand what the linked page is about and can improve rankings for that specific keyword.
Tool: Link Assistant populates linking suggestions directly in the WordPress editor. It also provides anchor text for the recommended link. Users can add the link simply by clicking the button or customize the anchor text to their preferences.
Takeaways
In our analysis of Visit A City, we’ve discovered the growth strategies that increased their traffic by 600% in 6 months.
Now, let’s recap which strategies to use on your website and others to reconsider.
Top 3 Strategies to Emulate
- Target a mix of branded and non-branded keywords. Visit A City's recent content expansion allowed them to target new, non-branded keywords. This strategy complemented their current branded rankings with greater visibility from non-branded searches. Ultimately, targeting both types of keywords is the preferred method for catering to existing and new, potential customers in search engines. It ensures maximum visibility on the SERP while increasing brand awareness.
- Use images to improve the user experience and stand out in search results. Visuals are a great way to engage users and provide a positive page experience. By including high-quality images and optimizing them for search engines, you can also improve your visibility in SERPs. Optimized images can appear as rich snippets, which have higher clickthrough rates than standard search results.
- Answer popular user questions to rank in Google People Also Ask. It's important to identify questions related to your industry or niche so you can tailor content to your users' needs. FAQs are an effective way of addressing these questions and increase the likelihood of appearing in Google's People Also Ask box. This section of the SERP provides high visibility, driving more clicks and traffic to your site.
Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider
- Don’t neglect the importance of H1s. A common theme I noticed on Visit A City is that they don't use H1s. An H1 tag is the primary title of a web page. It tells users and search engines what your page is about, making it one of the most important elements to include. Granted, Visit A City includes a title in the body copy, but search engines don't identify it as an H1, making it less effective. For your website, you can use tools like TruSEO to ensure you don't forget to optimize your H1 tags.
- Don’t skip canonical tags. Canonical tags tell search engines which URL is your preferred version of a page. They’re particularly helpful for avoiding duplicate content issues but are also important to include on singular pages. You can customize and manage canonical URLs easily in AIOSEO using the Robots.txt Editor.
- Don’t forget to include schema markup. Visit A City includes some schema markup on its website, but it could be more thorough. Schema markup makes it easier for search engines to understand your web pages. And the easier it understands them, the greater your chances of ranking in organic results. Search engines also use schema to generate rich snippets, which have greater visibility in the SERPs. You can use a schema generator to implement schema without having to touch code.
Steal Our Winning SEO Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website
Download A Free SEO Checklist
Access our comprehensive SEO Checklist with a single click. We'll deliver it straight to you, putting actionable items with SEO tools and tutorials right at your fingertips.
Enter your name and email to download a free SEO checklist.
Boost Your Visibility & Organic Traffic With AIOSEO
By following the strategies outlined in this case study, you can improve your website's visibility and drive organic growth.
AIOSEO offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help you implement these strategies effectively.
AIOSEO is the best WordPress plugin for SEO. It has over 3 million active users and thousands of 5-star reviews on wordpress.org. Users love it because it makes SEO easy. Busy business owners get powerful tools that streamline optimizations for increased visibility on the SERP.
Some favorites include:
- TruSEO Score: Level up your content and go beyond a simple pass or fail. TruSEO analyzes your on-page SEO, giving you actionable insights to maximize your content's reach.
- Robots.txt Editor: Control how bots crawl your site with the Robots.txt Editor, which allows you to override default WordPress settings. This tool makes it simple to view your robots.txt file and manage rules.
- Semrush Keyphrase Suggestions: Perform keyword research directly in the WordPress editor. AIOSEO connects with your Semrush account to generate and serve keyword ideas for your content.
- Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with a single click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
- FAQ Blocks: Add FAQs to your content to increase the likelihood of appearing in Google’s People Also Ask box. These results help boost brand awareness and increase clickthrough rates.
- Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your content in just 1 click. Link Assistant helps you effortlessly build a better linking strategy.
