About CabalgatasCanoa.com
Cabalgatas Canoa is a British-owned equestrian business on the coast of Ecuador, South America. They operate horseback riding tours along the 17km beach on the Pacific coast and jungle, brewery, and hillside tours further inland.
It’s a popular outdoor activity for tourists visiting the area, and they hold a strong TripAdvisor position for the locality with a profile boasting many 5-star reviews.
Project requirements / challenges
The owners wanted to raise their online profile and awareness to people visiting the area, tourists within the country, and those searching for things to do in Ecuador when planning a visit abroad.
In addition, they wanted the website to better serve the business for bookings, receiving payments, and other operational activities, which were conducted manually and either over the phone, Whatsapp messaging, or by email.
Our brief for this website build contained the following essential requirements:
- To design a website that showcases the core tours and pricing options
- To make the site available in dual language – English and Spanish
- To introduce a new service offering – multi-day riding vacations
- To demonstrate the core values and care of the horses at Cabalgatas Canoa
- Introduce a system where clients are made aware of the terms and conditions to ride and facilitate acceptance.
- To incorporate an online payment gateway to make bookings and receive payments
- To raise the online awareness of potential tourists/clients locally and close by
- To increase the online awareness of potential tourists/clients planning a visit to the country or local area
- To maintain ongoing and automated social proof with links to the TripAdvisor platform
Project deliverables and results
Below is an overview on how we helped deliver value to CabalgatasCanoa.com with tangible results.
Results for the business
- Conducted thorough Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis for locality and niche. Investigated search queries with local, national, and international intents. The business was left with a detailed understanding and many search query metrics to help them write content for the new website.
- Designed and built a multi-lingual website serving both English and Spanish-speaking visitors. The website showcases the business's current horseback tours along with multi-day vacations explaining accommodations, features, and location.
- Optimized content in line with content strategy derived from keyword research and competitor analysis
- The website includes a secure payment page where reading and accepting the business's terms and conditions are mandatory before securing payment and booking the tour.
- Automation of the rider registration process so details of each rider are submitted before riding, freeing up lots of time on the day of the event.
- Built a system to automatically pull in reviews left on the TripAdvisor platform so the website would showcase the most recent testimonials left by happy riders
- Introduced an owner blog to demonstrate their experience and level of care for their animals
- Built on WordPress with a shared hosting platform considering the number of site visits, required resources, and monthly budget. With lots of scope to scale as the business grows
- Implemented a support retainer, including routine monthly maintenance and proactive monitoring
- Created and optimized a new Google My Business listing to further raise the online profile of the business
- Developed multiple Facebook ads campaigns to cover targeted advertising during tourist high and low seasons
- Traffic and potential business are now coming from other online sources rather than just being limited to TripAdvisor clients.
- Inquiries and bookings have increased dramatically since the site was launched, and the business continues to expand!
We helped our client achieve a solid online profile with five page-one listings in Google Search for a prevalent search query tourists or clients would make when looking for equestrian activities in the local area.
The top two listings in the SERP are pages on their new website. The listings below are the TripAdvisor review website, their linked Facebook page, and a third-party tourism website.
To the right of the search listings is a dominant entry for their Google My Business page.
This result gave our client a very encouraging boost in organic traffic and inquiries to the business.
We achieved a dominant position in Google search for our client by leveraging their Google My Business page for a prevalent search term used by tourists or potential clients looking for equestrian activities at a national and international level.
Technical implementations / actions
-
Implemented a fully managed shared hosting solution
-
The site was built using WordPress and the Divi theme
-
eCommerce system built using WooCommerce and Stripe/Paypal integrations
-
Procured, implemented, and tested a reviews plugin to pull in reviews from the TripAdvisor platform automatically
-
Setup and configuration of RankMath SEO plugin to assist with optimizations and ranking efforts
-
Implementation of CDN
-
Registration of sitemap and configuration of Google My Business and Google Analytics
-
On-page optimizations, including:
-
Image library consolidation, compression, and introduction of WebP technology. Lazy load technology was also deployed
-
CSS / JavaScript load minify
-
Font pre-loading
-
-
Configured Facebook PPC campaigns and templates for the business to use should they experience a lull in organic enquiries.
-
Implemented maintenance and security retainer to ensure ongoing availability, comprising:
-
Software updates, where necessary
-
Automated daily offsite backups
-
System to prevent brute force attacks
-
2FA for elevated users/admins
-
A sample of the design and layout
What they say about us…
“Thank you so much, Pages That Convert! We love the site, and so do our clients too.
Shortly after we launched it, our inquiries exploded. Lots more people are now finding us, whether they are tourists in Canoa or Ecuador. Or people still overseas and planning their next vacation. Our calendar is currently booked up solid for the next four months, and people are starting to book well in advance for the following year. Business has never been better!
The site saves us so much time now that all the tours and processes are described online. Making payments is now easier than ever for our clients. No more pre-meeting to accept cash or trying to organize cumbersome bank transfers, wires, or Western Union payments. We now have a solution to accept card payments from clients of any nationality without any of the previous hassles. And it makes it super easy for our clients to pay us. This has freed us up to do what we do best – Help people find their inner cowboy!
Gray and his team were amazing at understanding our challenges and helping us realize and make the site’s vision come to life. And the review plugin was the icing on the cake.
We will use your services again when we expand our routes and need some new pages.”
