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Halsbury Travel

Post-pandemic recovery for a leading travel brand.

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Halsbury Travel

Contents

Overview

Halsbury is a UK-based educational travel company that specialises in organising bespoke trips for school groups – from incredible school ski trips to experiences in far-flung destinations such as Iceland.

Halsbury’s trips are seriously impressive. We get fresh travel-inspo every time we work on their site!

Following the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a devastating impact on the travel industry, Halsbury sought to move quickly and rebuild by establishing a strong online presence.

They approached us in the summer of 2021 with a clear objective: use SEO to increase their market share and attract as much business as possible from schools post-pandemic.

The Challenge

Halsbury faced several key challenges:

  • A website that was not optimised for SEO, making it difficult to compete in search engine rankings.
  • Technical issues with their CMS, which negatively affected site performance and visibility.
  • Underperforming content that did not capitalise on their authority in the educational travel sector.

Fortunately, we have plenty of experience with a range of travel brands so we knew exactly what to do.

Our Approach

We’ve now worked with Halsbury for three years, and the SEO campaign has evolved over time. So far, it’s consisted of two main phases.

Phase 1: Foundational SEO Work (2021–2023)

  • Site Optimisation: Updated and reorganised key landing pages to improve both user experience and SEO performance.
  • Content Strategy: Enhanced title tags, headers, and on-page copy, while removing low-performing blog posts and improving high-potential content.
  • Technical Fixes: Resolved critical CMS issues, ensuring the site was easier to crawl and more functional.
  • Internal Linking: Improved internal linking structures to boost page authority and simplify navigation.

Phase 2: New Website Launch (2023–2025)

  • Collaborated with their development agency to design and launch a new website.
  • Reviewed and advised on website designs and pre-launch staging sites.
  • Supported the site’s launch and conducted comprehensive audits to identify and resolve post-launch issues.
  • Provided data-driven recommendations to enhance post-launch performance.

Results

We’re really proud of our results:

  • Increased Search Visibility: A 55% increase in visibility for target keywords in the first year, with an additional 21% rise since. The number of keywords in the top three positions grew from 57 to 127.
  • Significant Traffic Growth: Organic traffic increased by 220%, equating to thousands of extra visits each month.
  • Boosted Enquiries and Bookings: A corresponding rise in enquiries led to a significant increase in bookings, helping Halsbury to thrive post-pandemic.

“Working with Sam at Searchmode has been an absolute game-changer for our travel business. His expertise and strategic approach helped us significantly enhance our online visibility so that we were in a very strong position for recovery following the pandemic. Sam has been supporting us for several years now, including our recent website rebuild, and his expertise and advice are invaluable to us as a business.”

Katie Wylie, Head of Marketing

Contact

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