Scaling Tourist Traffic for NYC & Company

Our task was to help NYC & Company with organic traffic to their site NYCgo. Being a large website with thousands of pages, we tackled making some technical optimizations to their site and offering suggestions for SEO copywriting. We quickly identified that because there was such a high volume of traffic from other countries (naturally, as NYCgo is mainly a tourism site) that modifying their href language attributes could help them rank higher in other countries.

Additionally we scanned SEMRush for low hanging fruit and helped their developers remove some easy to fix errors that would increase page rankings. Finally, we conducted keyword research for multiple categories on their site so that we could advise on SEO copywriting and eventually ad copywriting.

After gaining some organic search movement, we dove into online ad management. The fun challenge here was becoming intimate with their existing Google Ads account and using some of our own knowledge to optimize new tourism campaigns based on the existing brand tone and some strategic copywriting.

Getting Into the Details

Since NYCgo is a global tourism site that offers translation in multiple languages, we took a look at their hreflang tags and decided there were some low effort implementations that would result in high impact results. By structuring their translated pages to use the correct hreflang attribute, we built an array of options that would serve higher search results for queries in certain languages. Our analytics determined that as a result we gained a large increase in search traffic to language subdomains.

Auditing the site with SEMRush also revealed a lot of potential to clean up technical development issues on the site. With a sitemap as large as NYCgo, it was essential that we determined which optimizations could be made with low effort by relaying programatic efficiencies to the NYCgo development team. As we continued to monitor and determine technical fixes, we noticed their SEMRush health score steadily increasing.

Our keyword research on Moz allowed us to not only help with meta data improvements, but put our team in position to collaborate with the NYCgo editorial team. Now instead of injecting keywords into pre-written articles, our team was able to help with suggestions that gave the editorial team a starting guide to write articles optimized for search queries.