Holiday Bowl

Client Info:
Name: Holiday Bowl
Website: HolidayBowl.com
Summary: The mission of the non-profit San Diego Bowl Game Association is to generate tourism, exposure, economic benefit and civic pride for San Diego and its citizens by presenting the nation’s most exciting and entertaining bowl games and festivals of events. The San Diego Bowl Game Association is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization which produces the Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl and the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl.
Length of project: 3 months

Holiday Bowl's Goal(s):

• Increase organic traffic in peak season (December), the day of the bowl game, and in the offseason
• Increase search-based ticket sale leads
  • Improve position to #1 in search results for "holiday bowl tickets"
  • Rank above national ticket selling brands

Services Performed:

• Search Engine Optimization
  • Keyword Research
  • Competitive Analysis
  • SEO Fundamentals
• Content Strategy and Creation

Results:
Let's tackle each of the goals one at a time.

GOAL #1: In terms of organic traffic, here's how things compared year-over-year (2009 to 2008):

• Peak season organic traffic*: UP 73%
• Peak season Google organic traffic: UP 82%
• Day-of-game organic traffic*: UP 78%
• Day-of-game Google organic traffic: UP 90%
• Off-season (January - May) organic traffic*: UP 43%
• Off-season (January - May) Google organic traffic*: UP 53%

* Organic traffic includes Google, Yahoo!, Bing, AOL, Ask, Alta Vista

Here are some secondary metrics that might not be as sexy as the pure traffic figures, but they tells us about Holiday Bowl's expanded reach in organic search. Again, these numbers compare year-over-year (2009 to 2008):

• The amount of organic keywords that sent traffic to the website went up 218% during the peak season. That means going forward (and they are already seeing the benefits with an overall increase in organic traffic) there are more than three times as many keywords in the search engines resulting in traffic begin delivered to the website. That's three times as many keywords benefiting from an improved search engine strategy.

GOAL #2: In terms of achieving #1in search for "holiday bowl tickets" ahead of the national ticket selling brands, pictures ultimately speak louder than words. But take a look at these numbers:

For the Holiday Bowl's peak season, they received 238% more traffic for keywords including some combination of "holiday bowl" and "tickets" including a 185% increase for "holiday bowl tickets".


Here are the results for Google: