ChaletFinder Case Study

ChaletFinder are an online platform catering to the skiing and snowboarding market for those looking to book a chalet in their favourite location. With over 1,4000 chalets listed on the website in over 150 resorts around the world, ChaletFinder is one of the most popular destinations for those looking to book a chalet online. With chalets randing from catered, self-catered, luxury, apartments and hotels, ChaletFinder is designed to find you the perfect chalet for your trip.

Challenge

ChaletFinder came to us with a challenge to help them develop their marketing strategy to boost traffic to their website and ultimately revenue. At this point, the website was running on an outdated custom built solution which needed a complete rebuild. As such, they wanted to make sure that when rebuilding the entire online platform, they weren’t going to lose any of their historical SEO strength that had been built up and most importantly, they wanted to make sure that the website was being built in the best way possible to maximise their return and boost organic traffic to the website as a result.

Naturally they choose to work with Contrado Digital for a project of this size and importance as they are aware of our reputation for working closely with larger organisations to help them with these types of projects to make sure everything goes to plan. Getting a project like this wrong can result in catastrophic damages to your website traffic which is why it was important to ChaletFinder to work with a reputable company who has many years of experience helping similar organisations with these types of projects.

The online platform was being built to improve performance of the outdated system, boost website traffic and generate online enquires for chalets. With organic traffic suffering from previous years, it was clear that a lot of work needed to be done.

Strategy

With and larger project like this, it is important to start to understand the legacy platforms and base recommendations for improvements so the new platform can be built well from scratch. As such we started with a full Technical SEO Audit to identify where things were going wrong with the old website which would be hindering their success from an SEO perspective.

We do these audits on a regular basis for larger companies to enable them to streamline their current digital assets and generate the best return they can. Once the foundations are in place after these recommendations have been implemented, an on-going strategy for organic traffic growth can then be maintained by becoming part of the monthly activities within the organisation if they aren’t already happening.

The Technical SEO Audit uncovered a few bad practices which had snuck into their old platform which needed to be addressed as a priority such as patching a few security holes which could have been exploited if identified by those with a different agenda. Cyber security is a growing problem for businesses of all shapes and sizes, often with a single line of code opening a back door which can be easily exploited when you know what to look for.

Once completed, the Technical SEO Audit identified a large amount of opportunities to make the most of what they already have in terms of content on their website. By working through this series of improvements over the next few months while building this functionality into their new website, they were able to plan for future growth easier.

Working closely with their internal development teams, we provided support & guidance so that the technical recommendations could be easily implemented and to make sure they were correct. While working with their marketing team alongside this, we were able to review some of the more exciting on-going opportunities to boost organic traffic further with a successful content strategy targeting their key markets throughout the world. With accurate goal tracking also configured as part of the process, ChaletFinder were now able to report accurately on website enquiries and what traffic sources were their most profitable marketing channels.

Results

The results speak for their self really, 94% growth in organic traffic as a direct result of the improvements we identified, recommended and supported with the implementation.

Naturally the winter ski season does fluctuate quite a bit over the various months, as you would expect, there are more people searching online when there is snow on the ground. So to put this into perspective, as the above graph does include seasonal trends. When taking an independent source of data from Google Trends, it is clear that at the point when demand was dropping, organic search traffic to ChaletFinder was significantly increasing which puts the results into an even greater perspective. Increasing organic traffic to the website when search demand is dropping is a significant achievement and one which has provided a solid foundation for ChaletFinder’s future growth strategy. The highlighted point on the graphs above and below are for easy comparison.