Cape LaHave Adventures is a Canadian kayak tours and rental business. The project involved SEO to increase visitors, and then building a new Shopify site to increase bookings.
Challenges
Cape LaHave Adventures always got rave reviews from customers but were hard to find in search.
- They had an attractive site built in SquareSpace but it wasn't SEO-friendly and all their competitors were ranking ahead of them in search results
- They weren't appearing in the first page of results for any important keywords
The first phase of this project focussed solely on SEO to improve Google rankings. After achieving great results with SEO (their website traffic literally doubled) we turned the focus to improving conversion rates which were generally below 1%.
Project Features
During the SEO project I focussed on:
- Keyword research to identify the most popular search terms people were using
- Rewriting page titles, descriptions, headings and other important content elements
- Creating new social media profiles and a YouTube channel
- Increasing the number of "backlinks" by creating online directory listings, blog articles and social posts
After website visitors doubled improving the site to capture more bookings became an obvious opportunity. I migrated the website from SquareSpace to Shopify and some of the features of the new site included:
- Making "products" (tours, lessons and rentals) much more visible on the homepage
- Unique templates for different types of products, each with their own sets of supporting content
- Lots more product information including things like tour highlights, experience needed, what was included, what to bring, information on meals and accommodation to ensure no questions were left unanswered prior to booking
- More images for tours and lessons allowing people to better "experience" products
- An integrated online booking widget (using BookThatApp) for tours, lessons and rental products
- Customising the Shopify theme to show the full price of products but only require a 50% deposit to book
- Add-on options for tours like sleeping bag and wetsuit rental
- Additional site content including FAQs, tour guide profiles, and highlighting key selling points
- Adding a live Google reviews feed to showcase rave reviews
- Creating product "bundles" like Sea Kayak + Sauna packages
The End Result
The original SEO campaign improved average Google ranking from position 20 to position 3, and increased website visitors from 1,200/month to 2,400/month.
On launching the new Shopify site conversion rates doubled overnight and continued to increase. The SEO campaign and the website relaunch together increased online sales by over 300%.
See the website at capelahaveadventures.ca
