Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 24.07.2023 
Candidsky is a performance marketing agency based in Manchester, England, specialising in SEO, Paid Media and content marketing. For the Global Search Awards, we entered four total categories and took home the win for ‘Best SEO Campaign – Travel/Leisure (small) with our educational travel client NST.
However, award winning work doesn’t just happen overnight – there’s hundreds of hours behind our team’s triumph and we’re here to give you a glimpse into how we did it.
Technical SEO improvements were the starting point for the NST website and a number of urgent concerns were addressed during the initial research and analysis stage.
The SEO team also conducted the following audits and checks using the findings to make changes and updates to the site:
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Site Speed Audit
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Click Through Rate Audit
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Regular content and keyword updates throughout the campaign –
Working with NST to assess the volumes and quality of the traffic being driven to evolve the strategy in line with commercial targets.
Content was the next key area, following Google’s E-E-A-T update:
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NST Content Audit
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Competitor Content Audit
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Owned Content Audit
Following these audits, we carried out extensive content creation work on the NST website to better serve website visitors and capture them at every stage of the buyer journey.
The last area was authority, which entailed consistently building relevant backlinks to the homepage and priority trip pages. We identified in the early stages that similar competitors lacked high-quality backlinks in the DA 30-50 range, so we focused our efforts on building better, higher-quality links at scale to send improved trust signals to Google’s algorithm.
The end result?
● New users increase by 119.25%
● Goal completions (school trip enquiries) increase by 181.73%
● The website achieved 1st position rankings for 93% of its commercial keyword set – effectively dominating the educational travel market.
Considering the major competition and relatively small budget for this campaign, we’re so proud of what our team has achieved and we thank the judges for recognising our hard work.
Just to be nominated for the award was a major achievement for us and to take home the win from the beautiful venue in Paris was the cherry on top. We celebrated back home in Manchester and were welcomed by the team who cheered us on like football fans at a world cup final!
Everything from the organisation of the event, the food, waiters, judges, hosts and how special we felt on the night made it one of the best awards our company has been a part of. We can’t wait to see you again next year – and who knows where it will take us!
‘The awards exceeded all our expectations. Everything from the location, staff, food and entry process was seamless and met all our expectations and more!’ – David Vernon
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