Who Are Lakeland Ascents?
Lakeland Ascents are a team of highly professional mountaineering and climbing instructors. They provide a range of courses, instructions and private guiding in the mountains of the Lake District, Snowdonia and the Scotish Highlands.
They also offer a range of adventure days and challenges in the Lake District for groups, families and social occasions.
Services Delivered
– Pay Per Click Advertising
– Search Engine Optimisation
The Challenge
Lakeland Ascents had been running a Google Ads campaign for 3 websites (Lakeland Ascents, Lake District Activities & Highland Ascents) for sometime with relatively positive results. The campaign had clearly had an impact on incoming enquiries and overall they had been satisfied by the results.
However, the spend was increasing without them really knowing which areas were producing the most business. They were also unsure if the right keywords were being targeted and what were the most effective bids.
The account also had no conversion tracking set up so it was impossible to know what return they were actually getting for the ad spend. They were also targeting 3 separate websites from the same account, this was resulting in it being hard to judge what budget to apply to each website and would have been negatively affecting quality scores (there’s a good blog about that here).
Moving forward they also wanted to become less reliant on PPC advertising and build a stronger organic presence.
The Solution
Initially Tall Marketing did a full review of the Google Ads performance. This started with what areas were using the most budget, right down to target keywords, click through rates and landing page performance.
After an initial meeting it became apparent that a large number of enquiries came through their website contact form. Through utilising Google Analytics Goal Tracking we were able to begin tracking each form submission and trace it back to the source. In regards to Google Ads, this meant we would track the source right back to the initial keyword used to generate the initial visit to the website. Previously they would only have a total number of form submissions, now we could report exactly where these submissions were coming from and make qualified decisions.
We also immediately got to work on splitting out the 3 separate target websites into 3 seperate accounts. Using a management account meant we could quickly access each account and view total spend without having to use separate logins.
In month 3 we also began work on an SEO campaign specifically focussed on the Lakeland Ascents website. This included detailed keyword research, an initial on page SEO audit and a content plan. After initial benchmarking our work was focused on building Google search rankings our identified target keywords (search terms).
The Results
Overall after 12 months of PPC campaign management we’ve increased the CTR by 25% which generally results in more clicks for less spend. Not only that but the spend is highly targeted so the quality of visitors has increased which makes it more likely paid for clicks will result in enquiries.
We are also able to show a detailed cost per acquisition of the Google Ads activity to give them a much improved overview of performance.
Organically the Lakeland Ascents website continues to increase visibility. The content plan that is being executed is delivering continuous ranking improvements and is overall lifting the authority of the whole website.
Tall Marketing keep in regular contact by producing interactive online reports so the Lakeland Ascents team can review all parts of the PPC and SEO activity. As they’re keen to keep tight control of the content that’s published everything we produce is sent over for review before being added to the website.
An SEO campaign is not going to deliver the instant results of PPC but long term can produce a much stronger ROI. The hope is that in the near future the company can become less reliant on the Lakeland Ascents ad spend thanks to a much improved organic presence.
Testimonial
We’ve been working with George for nearly 2 years now. Our marketing spend is vital to us and having received large quotes from other companies we were unable to find a worthwhile partner. Then George provided the proposal we were looking for. He brings an expert knowledge of search engine marketing that has transformed the way we look at our online ad spend.
Si Withington – Lakeland Ascents