The Elliott Hotel - SEO Case Study

Jul 17, 2009

Experience the olde charm of The Elliott Hotel - Auckland Hotels. The Elliott Hotel sits in the heart of the Auckland CBD, right next to the Civic Theatre, SkyCity, and The Edge Aotea Centre. With a refit that has kept the old look and retained the high ceilings, you have the best of both worlds.

The Elliott Hotel Auckland www.elliottaucklandcityhotel.com boasts 60 Apartment style rooms ranging from studio to 1 and 2 bedroom units. Book and enjoy.

Web Development and SEO

We have a good working relationship with Tim Turner of EyeTurner Website Design who has produced a fantastic design for the new Elliott Hotel website.

We have then cut it up and added SEO'ed content and development to it.

Internationalisation

The biggest part of the website is the Internationalisation aspect.

The major search traffic for Auckland Hotels comes in from offshore. But if you check out who ranks for Auckland Hotel related phrases on each of Google.co.nz, .com, .com.au, .co.uk etc you will find that each countries websites are given preference over New Zealand websites. So how do you get that country preference into one website?

New Domain name

Rather than the existing esapts.co.nz domain, we needed a .com domain, and best to have one that included some achievable search phrases in it. Google ranks sites higher easier for search phrases that are included in its domain. Hence www.elliottaucklandcityhotel.com - Brand name in it, and the slightly less competitive phrase "Auckland City Hotel" in there.

But it does make it slightly long... so for email addresses, they have opted for shorter and easier to remember "TheElliottHotel.com", a domain that redirects to the longer version.

Previous Domain

A new domain takes time to get ranking... so we have retained the Auckland Hotels esapts.co.nz website till at least the new one starts ranking well, and depending on how things go, we may keep both. We have copied the new design onto the www.esapts.co.nz site, and tweaked the content to make it different enough on Google so as not to harm rankings. You will see some sitemaps on the site of the old url's that then redirect into the new ones. If we let Google know of the transition, we get faster migration between the url's. I have checked Google webmaster tools, and made sure that the top phrases it was ranking for, are included on the esapts.co.nz homepage.

20 Countries Targeted

We have targeted 20 countries using the new dot com domain, and the internationalisation component of Google Webmaster tools.

ie
Hotel Auckland (UK) http://www.elliottaucklandcityhotel.com/uk/
Auckland Accommodation (Au) http://www.elliottaucklandcityhotel.com/au/
ホテルオークランド (Japanese) http://www.elliottaucklandcityhotel.com/ja/

Google Translation Tool

It is interesting using the Google translation tool. You need to first translate to the foreign language, then retranslate back into English. If the English version is bad, you need to simplify the English and try again. It is an interesting process.

Links links and more links. Time, time and more time

It is not easy to get a hotel website ranked for City related phrases. It will require ongoing links work to get it in the top ten. And it will likely take months, if not over a year. Time, not the easiest thing to have to wait.

And then there are the ongoing issues of people copying content, and rankings diving. We need to be ever vigilant of how the site is ranking, and the reason for any changes.

All the best TheElliottHotel.

Tags: SEO Case Studies