The Campaign

Our insights into the industry showed that ‘Honeymoon Packages’ is a highly searched for keyword with a monthly volume of approximately 121,500. Our main motive was to capitalise on the popularity of this keyword without bidding on it and in the process prove the power of smart SEO. Thus, when a potential customer searches for keywords related to honeymoon packages, they would see the link to the Thomas Cook page. Simply put, the objective was to target the keyword ‘Honeymoon Packages’, as it generates a lot of clicks. We wanted to beat the biggest competitor - MakeMyTrip, in organic rankings for the keyword. Our goal was to generate organic visits for the Thomas Cook website using this keyword.

Creative Execution

In a matter of a week we set up a new page where users could share their experience is the form of blogs, reviews, testimonials, videos and pictures. This page was updated on a regular basis to ensure that the content on the page was fresh. The official Thomas Cook India blog also gave backlinks to this page in order to accentuate the process. Thus, people reading the blog could click on the link and then share their experiences with us on the Honeymoon page. The best part is we did not bid on the keyword ‘Honeymoon Packages’ to prove the power of smart SEO. Thus, all the results were generated organically with user-generated content being the driving force. The page soon became a leading destination for Honeymoon Package seekers soon after it went live.

The final results could be deemed nothing short of exceptional. We beat MakeMyTrip, the biggest competitor in terms of organic rankings for ‘Honeymoon Packages’. The page generated 8% of Unique Visitors for the Thomas Cook website – the second highest source after the homepage. In addition to this, the bounce rate of the page was only 25.22% - the lowest of all pages! Also, 62% of the sales on the Honeymoon Packages page were attributed to organic search. What’s more, the content for the entire campaign was crowd sourced, which means that the spends were at a minimum. Our efforts were so successful that the page still ranks on the second spot on Google Search. All this without any additional spends. In fact the ‘Honeymoon Packages’ pages is the second most traffic generating page after the Thomas Cook home page.

For Thomas Cook, we managed to improve our search ranking with minimal spends. The Thomas Cook campaign was a massive success as it allowed us to feature on the top spot on Google Search for ‘Honeymoon Packages’. This is extremely beneficial as research proved this is a popular reached for keyword. By ranking organically we could insure maximum clicks and visits to our website. If fact, this page is still the second most traffic generating page after the home page!

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

The challenge we were facing was that MakeMyTrip, a direct competitor was leading the race for the ‘Honeymoon Packages’ keyword. The target was to overtake them and rank number one on Google Search without using Paid Media. Our strategy was to create a content rich page dedicated to Honeymoon Packages. But unique content creation would become a costly affair. So we though, what if we could crowd-source content and present it in interactive manner. People could share their experiences and joys they experienced while traveling with Thomas Cook. This content would be published on our microsite, giving the users credit for the content pieces they shared. On the other hand we would get quality content that was authentic and the best part was that it was extremely cost effective.