How Simpleview’s SEO Services are Helping Visit Dorset Reap the Rewards of Visitor Engagement

Overview

From dramatic beaches and bustling towns to charming villages and tranquil countryside, Dorset is a place of many attractions and a destination that boasts a classic appeal. But for Visit Dorset — the Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) that represents the county — its website is critical in both attracting visitors and helping them discover all that this unique place has to offer. As we’ll see, Visit Dorset has utilised Simpleview’s SEO solutions to guarantee that — year after year, challenge after challenge — its digital presence stands the test of time, ensuring the success of its website is felt throughout this destination.

Leaning on a long-term relationship to overcome challenges to engagement

Working together in a partnership of many years, Visit Dorset has not only long relied upon Simpleview to support the very fabric of its site, but for the knowledge and expertise it receives as an SEO services client. Reflecting on the DMO’s longstanding use of the service, Rachel Symes, senior digital marketing officer for Visit Dorset remarks, “I honestly can't remember a time without it.” While Visit Dorset’s website puts the county’s charms and attractions front and centre, with the passing of time, the DMO has needed to adapt and respond to changes both on the ground and within the destination’s digital space.

As Rachel explains, “There’s been a lot of uncertain times in the last five years.” But despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the UK’s cost of living crisis, the destination has performed well in terms of overall engagement, capturing visitors online and in the real world. Speaking of the current challenges faced by Dorset and its website, Rachel acknowledges that while an increase in traffic is certainly a positive, the site’s overall engagement rate is “critical” to the success of the DMO and, likewise, to that of its many members.

Today, Visit Dorset utilises the knowledge gleaned as an SEO client to carefully tailor the information displayed on its site. In the practical sense, this means balancing visitor enthusiasm for Dorset’s much-loved coastline with the opportunity of offering newcomers the chance to discover its inland charms. The goal, as Rachel says, is to harness the power of SEO to “show the diverse offer of Dorset.”
 

Providing a blueprint for success

To this end, Rachel and her team work hard to create relevant and inspiring content, but — as she explains — the SEO services they receive ensure these efforts are focussed according to a careful strategy.

“We need that support and guidance in the background to be able to do that. SEO is the core to the success of the website.”

From digital to Durdle Door: the benefits of optimised SEO

Simpleview’s SEO services have allowed Visit Dorset to manage and act on the peaks and troughs it experiences in site traffic, something that is reflected within the wider destination. For example, thanks to optimised SEO, Rachel and her team have observed that traffic to the site peaks at the weekends and summer holidays. Understanding these peaks and troughs in traffic — and the content that is most popular with travellers — is also helping Visit Dorset to spread visitors throughout the entirety of the region, something that’s especially important when trying to preserve one of the area’s most iconic sites: Durdle Door.

As Rachel explains, “We found that Durdle Door was getting absolutely flooded with people … so we really needed to step back on advertising those areas.” On the back of this, Rachel and her team increased their efforts in advertising Dorset’s inland sites and attractions, offering visitors an exciting and alternative way to see the region while ensuring the whole county can truly benefit from the rich rewards of tourism.

In the wider sense, the benefits of SEO optimisation have been felt throughout the DMO as an organisation. “We're funded completely by Dorset Council, so we've got KPIs to meet to make sure that the website is performing how it's expected to perform,” says Rachel, adding, “It's been more difficult in recent years … but we’ve managed to meet those KPIs.”

While that’s certainly important, Rachel clarifies that because Visit Dorset relies upon membership income to support its services it needs to be able to drive traffic to the onsite listings of individual members in order to provide a solid return on investment. Thanks to optimised SEO, Rachel says, “We can go out to all of our members and say, ‘Here's our website stats, here's your product stats, here's the traffic that's coming to your website,’ and they can see that's a really good return on investment.” What’s more, she adds, “Our members are telling us that the site is one of their top referrers.”
 

Implementing practical advice, amplifying positive results

For Rachel, the support and insight received from the SEO services team is critical to the success of the Visit Dorset site. The recommendations made, she says, “help us to identify where the gaps are in the site and where we can focus our energy,” something that is invaluable when working within a small team. For example, Visit Dorset has seen an improvement to the overall page rankings of its website by focussing on meta titles, meta descriptions, and H2 subheadings.

For Rachel and her colleagues, the information produced by the SEO services team — which helps to identify areas of improvement for the Visit Dorset site — is also extremely valuable, especially when investigating underperforming keywords. Likewise, the reports offered by the SEO team enable Visit Dorset to analyse the success of content year over year. As Rachel explains, “I can look back and go, ‘OK, so these were the key search terms for that time last year, so have we got the content in place for this year? Can we put that more out onto our socials to drive traffic?’”

This level of service not only enables the DMO to know what’s happening in the wider world of SEO, but with the opportunity to apply that knowledge to enhance the success of Dorset both online and in the real world.

“It’s really good to have that support. We always now rank organically number one or very close to the top four key search terms. It's just driving a lot of traffic to the site,” Rachel says, adding that the support and expertise received by Visit Dorset truly “amplifies the success of the website.”