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SME’s using search to grow their business: Sun Isle Holidays

Guest post by: Lucy Green

Article Overview: Founded in 2001, Sun Isle Holidays is an Internet only travel company offering holidays to the Greek islands. The role of Weboptimiser has been to provide advice and support for the Sun Isle’s search marketing, but particularly for PPC. Weboptimiser has taken a proactive approach to the business, not only using PPC to drive more relevant traffic to the site, but providing advice on other aspects of the business too.

SME’s using search to grow their business: Sun Isle Holidays

Founded in 2001, Sun Isle Holidays is an Internet only travel company offering holidays to the Greek islands.

The travel sector has been completely transformed by the Internet. It has given consumers far more control over their holidays with thousands of companies and destinations to choose from available on the web. For a small specialist provider like Sun Isle Holidays, the Internet has given them the opportunity to promote their business alongside the larger companies we all know.

As an online only player, Sun Isle have developed an attractive, simple to use and easy to navigate site with clear products to give visitors as much reason for choosing them for their holiday as possible.

Effective online marketing is crucial to this business, and their mix of organic search and e-mail marketing had been successful. They had used some pay per click (PPC) marketing, but as a small business with limited resources had struggled to make the most of it and saw it as a “black art” - very technical, labour intensive and demanding, not to mention expensive.

The role of Weboptimiser has been to provide advice and support for the Sun Isle’s search marketing, but particularly for PPC. The managing director, Nick McKenna, believes Weboptimiser have been able to generate very positive results for the business in a short space of time. Weboptimiser has taken a proactive approach to the business, not only using PPC to drive more relevant traffic to the site, but providing advice on other aspects of the business too.

One of the best things of using search marketing for this business has been the ability to measure its effectiveness, particularly in comparison to print advertising which was once the favourite of smaller travel companies. Sun Isle can see the number of impressions and click-throughs from individual adverts and ad placements, and to assess their conversion rate. This intelligence allows them to build new advertising campaigns, targeted at the right audience and therefore get the most from their promotional budgets.

Nick McKenna concludes that they are pleased to be working together with Weboptimiser and that the company has been able to “deliver on their promises” to help this SME grow its business.

For more Weboptimiser case studies, visit www.weboptimiser.com or www.semcasestudy.com

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