City of Choice Travel is a top-notch travel company specialising in wellness travel in Africa for a discerning local and international traveller.

Perfect vehicle

The web is perfectly suited to the travel industry, an ideal vehicle for the international nature of City of Choice Travel. The flip side of this is that it is a fiercely competitive market in terms of quality of content and search on the most relevant keywords. Web presence needs to be very well supported and well 'niched' in order to make any impact.

Virtuoso digs deep

The Virtuoso team delved into the site from all perspectives and made recommendations based on the business communications strategy as a whole in addition to the actual site development and search engine optimisation campaign. We also created a detailed content restructure for the site.

City of Choice Travel has taken action on many of the recommendations and the site and business as a whole is reaping the rewards.

Site message, content and structure

It was initially unclear exactly who the target market was - a business-to-business or consumer focus? Virtuoso supplied a custom-designed marketing questionnaire to City of Choice in order to establish defined company markets and strategies that facilitate clear communication.

Exotic travel themes

We suggested a restructure of the site content into evocative travel 'themes':
•    Body and Soul
•    Safari and Bush Pleasures
•    The Executive Approach
•    Conferences and Incentives
•    Lavish Travel
•    Beach Paradise
•    Authentic Heritage Tours
•    Footprint into Africa

These were created in order to support the 'niche' concept, as well as appeal to consumer senses and travel aspirations.

All the original destinations, packages and itineraries as well as new ones can fit under one or more of these themes. This organisation helps the user to find what they want easily, as well as create exciting content. Landing pages with custom web copy were created by Virtuoso to support this concept.

Geography graphic

In terms of design content we made sure a South African flag was prominent on the site as there was previously not enough immediate communication that the site is about tourism and travel in Southern Africa.

Research Snapshot

In order to establish where City of Choice are at the moment, Virtuoso conducted some comparative research on the best keywords for City of Choice Travel. Looking at how City of Choice Travel's website compared to two major competitors on the agreed keywords, in the Google, Google France, Google Germany, Yahoo and MSN search engines. A snapshot was created of City of Choice Travel, and where they stood on the web.

On Page SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is divided into on and off-page SEO. On page SEO involves making sure the actual web development is optimised to give the search engine spiders everything they need to understand the web content and rank it as relevant in the desired sectors. Virtuoso supplied a full breakdown of how to work the on-page SEO perfectly to reflect the keywords that City of Choice Travel needed to rank highly in. We also supplied the keywords that 'niched' the company beautifully and where it would be easier to quickly dominate a search. We demonstrated how to maximise the use of page titles, headings, content URL's, metadata tags. Meta descriptions and image summaries.

The recommendations laid out exactly how City of Choice could optimise their on-page SEO in order to achieve maximum search engine success.

Off Page SEO
Getting yourself publicised on the 'net is what Off-page SEO is all about. Creating a finite and measurable campaign that results in many back-links to the City of Choice Travel site, as well as ideas for excellent and regular content update were supplied to City of Choice by the Virtuoso team. All the information on exactly HOW to create and action a strong and structured back-linking campaign was supplied with the report.

Social Networking

The nature of the high-end wellness travel niche lent itself beautifully to social networking, which has been used to great and ongoing success by City of Choice subsequent to the Virtuoso recommendations.

City of Choice Travel - Specific Added Value

After discussing and establishing the target market, Virtuoso set up French and German mini-sites in those languages, with links to the detail in the main site. This adds immense value and goodwill toward those clients by addressing them in their own language. The ethos of City of Choice Travel is entrenched in a very high level of service, and this type of 'extra mile' is very indicative of the company brand.

The Virtuoso team had great fun coming up with plenty of content ideas for the site, such as extensive and useful travel tips, industry news, consumer news and wonderful travel articles.

Quarterly Research

In order to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign, Virtuoso also laid out the costs and details of quarterly research that can be conducted to show how the SEO on the site and the off-page campaign improve rankings.

Virtuoso would like to thank City of Choice Travel for the opportunity to work on their site and be a part of their success!

Caroline Hastings-Brown, Creative Copy and Strategic Services
Mike Saunders, New Business Developer, Sesalos