Case study
Visitors don't search by your organisation chart.
Visit Newcastle is the city's official destination marketing platform, covering accommodation, food, events, attractions and experiences. By mid-2023 the site was not matching that breadth of visitor demand: technical issues were suppressing visibility, and content was organised more around how the organisation described Newcastle than how travellers searched for it.
The challenge
Visit Newcastle already had strong recognition and a substantial catalogue of experiences to promote. The problem sat underneath that. Canonical and pagination errors were suppressing visibility across important pages, hundreds of legacy 404s were reducing crawl efficiency, internal linking was not consistently reinforcing high-value destination pages, and the content had not been systematically mapped against the questions travellers use to plan a stay.
There was also an organisational constraint. Visit Newcastle publishes through a multi-stakeholder workflow, so any SEO approach that depended on us touching every page forever was never going to scale. The programme needed to make the site easier to discover, and make good search decisions easier for the internal team to repeat.
A strong destination brand was underperforming against the searches people use to plan a trip.
- Canonical and pagination errors suppressing visibility across key pages
- Hundreds of legacy 404s reducing crawl efficiency
- Content not mapped to how visitors search for Newcastle experiences
- Publishing decisions made ad hoc across a multi-stakeholder workflow
The result
More of Newcastle became discoverable through the searches travellers were already making.
Sessions and rankings show that Visit Newcastle became more discoverable during research and planning. They do not count people who physically travelled to Newcastle.
- +64%
- Organic traffic Within 18 months of engagement start
- +76%
- Top-3 ranking keywords Published case study
- 52k
- Organic sessions a month Peak, Oct '24
The insight
The site was organised around the destination. Search happens around the visitor.
A destination marketing organisation naturally thinks in official categories, campaigns and internal content structures. Travellers do not. They search for what to do in Newcastle, where to eat, where to stay, events this weekend, beaches and coastal experiences, and things to do with specific people, interests or timeframes.
The opportunity was to reorganise search priorities around those visitor questions, then connect them back to the experiences Visit Newcastle already had to offer. Before that could work, the technical blockers had to go.
The strategy
Fix the foundation. Map the visitor. Build it into the workflow.
- Remove the technical friction first.Canonical errors, pagination, internal-linking inefficiencies and the legacy 404 backlog were dealt with before content expansion. That work was mostly invisible to visitors, but it meant later content improvements could be crawled, understood and compounded instead of sitting on a broken foundation.
- Build the content map from traveller behaviour.We researched the queries people use when planning a Newcastle visit and organised opportunities across the core destination themes: accommodation, things to do, food and events. Existing pages were aligned to those searches, priority pages were improved and new content was briefed against the same demand map.
- Put the search intelligence inside the team.Rather than make us the permanent gatekeeper of publishing, the programme produced reusable tools for the internal team: templated content briefs, on-page optimisation checklists, performance-review templates and quarterly strategic reviews. The SEO programme needed to survive the publishing workflow.
The shift
From organisation categories to visitor questions.
- How the organisation sees the destinationEvents · accommodation · food · experiences · campaigns
- How visitors search“What's on in Newcastle this weekend?” · “Things to do Newcastle” · “Where to stay Newcastle” · “Newcastle beaches”
- Content mapEach search matched to a page: optimise, consolidate or create
- Publishing systemBrief · checklist · publish · review
What we did
Technical foundation. Resolved canonical issues, rebuilt pagination, cleaned the legacy 404 backlog and restructured internal linking toward the highest-value destination pages.
Search-demand mapping. Researched visitor searches across accommodation, things to do, food and events, then mapped those queries against the existing site to identify where pages needed optimisation, refresh or new coverage.
Content optimisation. Improved priority destination pages and briefed new content against the same search map, so publishing decisions were connected to identifiable visitor demand rather than ad hoc topic selection.
Internal capability. Built content briefs, review checklists and performance templates that Visit Newcastle's internal stakeholders could use without us becoming a bottleneck in every publishing decision.
The takeaway
Search visibility had to become part of the publishing system, not an agency add-on.
The technical repairs created the foundation. The content map connected Visit Newcastle's experiences to the way travellers actually search. What made the programme sustainable was putting those decisions into briefs, checklists and review processes the internal team could keep using.
We did not just optimise pages. We made visitor search behaviour part of how the organisation decides what to publish, and how.
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