partnership
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Travelstart is one of Africa’s biggest and most-loved travel booking brands. It makes travel more accessible to everyone, from business travellers to adventure-seekers. When Travelstart first partnered with YDA, the travel industry was still recovering from the severe impact of COVID. Demand had plummeted, customer trust needed rebuilding, and the digital landscape had shifted dramatically. Our collaboration focused on: * Rebuilding organic visibility and demand post-COVID. * Resolving technical and structural SEO issues. * Preparing key pages and content for AI-driven discovery (Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc.). * Creating integrated dashboards to unify SEO and content performance reporting. * Auditing and enhancing Travelstart’s affiliate strategy. |
challenge
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Our challenges included: Addressing post-COVID demand drop and a sharp decline in organic demand and traffic volume across travel. Brand awareness decline and lower visibility for both branded and non-branded queries. Technical Issues such as crawling/indexing inefficiencies, slow page load times, and site structure issues negatively impacting SEO performance and UX. Duplicate versions of the site created confusion for search engines, resulting in diluted authority. SERP competition from Google’s own travel tools (flights/hotels) occupied prime real estate in search results, reducing visibility. 2024 Google Algorithm Updates around E-E-A-T, Core Web Vitals, and the rollout of AI Overviews created additional ranking volatility. Travelstart’s affiliate network was under-leveraged, with tracking and content alignment gaps that reduced impact on revenue. And there was a lack of LLM visibility and performance tracking with no consistent visibility across AI-powered search platforms, and no reporting framework in place to track sourced pages, mentions, or traffic referrals from these platforms. |
approach
We decided to take a phased, scalable approach to help Travelstart rebuild and future-proof their search presence amidst external forces.
Luckily, some technical fixes could create a stronger foundation for traffic growth and brand competitiveness, even in the “recovery” period during and after the pandemic.
We started by prioritising technical SEO fixes to improve indexation, crawlability, and page health.
We then optimised flight pages and blog content for both traditional SEO and LLM sourcing to make sure that no matter where potential customers were, they were able to find Travelstart, via AI and in other results.
The next step was to implement a schema markup to support structured data signals and AI inclusion further increasing findability and visibility as the nature of search began to change.
However, this wouldn’t mean much without the right view into performance and progress.
So we built a unified reporting framework to track organic sessions, blog performance, and LLM sourcing.
The next step involved auditing and relaunching the affiliate program, focusing on high-intent publisher partnerships, structured tracking, and offering placement that aligned with SEO goals in terms of topics and performance.
result
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The YDA team dedicated itself to improving overall SEO hygiene from every angle – technical, content, structural, and strategic, helping Travelstart regain visibility and accelerate growth again. Together, we achieved * A 17.52% MoM increase in traffic within 6 months. * 1,000+ of the keywords we targeted were on page 1 of Google within 6 months. * 10,000+ pages were indexed after technical updates. * There was a +174% increase in domestic and international flight bookings within 6 months. “Partnering with Your Digital Assembly has proven to be instrumental in elevating our online presence through smart SEO initiatives, and our results speak for themselves.” Mikha’il Ernest – COO, Travelstart |
174% ↑
Flight Bookings
1000 +
Keywords on pg.1