Island Wildlife Tour Operator: 4.5x More Top-10 Rankings on a Small Budget

A regional tour operator running whale watching, evening penguin tours and snorkelling with seals around a coastal island partnered with Technical Content Links in mid-2021, through a tourism marketing agency partner. The campaign has run on a small monthly budget ever since.

At a glance

• Industry: Travel and tourism, wildlife and island tours
• Engagement: White label SEO, from mid-2021, on a small monthly budget
• Starting point (June 2021): 58 keywords in Google’s top 10, 37 of them in the top five
• Results: 259 top-10 keywords and 181 top-five keywords at peak (July 2025)

The challenge

Wildlife tours are highly seasonal, and visitors plan around whale migrations and school holidays. The operator needed each tour page to rank for the experiences people search for, without the budget of a large tourism brand.

Our approach

Getting the basics right.

• Adding the XML sitemap to robots.txt, a schema audit and FAQ schema
• Footer optimisation, heading fixes, and new meta descriptions and H1s where they were missing
• Fixing 404s and broken and redirected internal links, plus redirects where pages had moved
• Rewriting historical content into an original page on the island’s history
• Internal linking audits, an XML sitemap clean-up and a new HTML sitemap
• Search Console audits and fixes, image alt text and canonical tags for paginated pages
• Competitor blog analysis, and re-optimisation of key tour and blog content

Then consistency. Month after month the campaign added guest post links to the key tour pages (whale watching, the evening penguin tour and snorkelling with seals) and the homepage, along with directory links and new blog content. Six-monthly reviews and technical audits kept it on track.

The results

• Rankings: keywords in Google’s top 10 grew from 58 to 259, about 4.5 times more. Keywords in the top five grew from 37 to 181.
• Traffic: average organic traffic grew from 426 visits a month in 2021 to 563 in 2024. Traffic swings with the tour seasons, so rankings are the clearest measure of progress.

Ranking and traffic figures are estimates from SE Ranking (Australian search database).

What this means for agencies

Seasonal tourism operators need to be visible when travellers are planning, not just when they arrive. Steady, affordable SEO builds that visibility year after year. We deliver campaigns at every budget, white label.

See how our white label SEO works, or read about our white label SEO for tourism.