Recently we created a website for a Queensland festival event that is held every two years.
Without doing any real SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) work, no real content strategy, no social media ads, no funnels or tripwires, nor much of anything else (aside from creating the website and a few strategic pages we wrote within it), we saw some nice spikes in traffic leading up to the event. But wouldn’t that be expected, you might be thinking? Yes it would.
The point of this short case study is to share that we were on stand-by leading up to the event to increase the resources within the website hosting, in case the festival experienced LARGE media attention. For example: if they received state-wide and/or nation-wide media coverage before and/or during the event, the website traffic would have increased instantly.
By being on stand-by (by being proactive), if the website experienced LARGE surges in visitor numbers (traffic) at any given time, we could increase hosting resource allocations so the website would not go down or crash (which is called a ‘server overload’).
We informed our client that we would be on stand-by to make hosting allocation increases if needed, and asked them to simply let us know in advance of any pre-scheduled large press-releases, media advertorial-style interviews (eg. if they were going to be featured on Channel 7’s Sunrise TV show) or any other major media coverage.
In the end, they received regional media coverage and the website held it’s own. The resources we allocated to it, at the hosting server end saw the website do very well with good loadspeeds and no outage caused by large traffic volumes.
As per every website we had a caching plugin setup to aid with PageSpeed Optimisation and other optimisations to additionally assist.
It was a very fun project to be a part of. My team and I very much enjoyed designing and building the website, doing the behind-the-scenes work and working with the Festival Committee.
It was also agreed to keep the website relatively simple using the K.I.S.S. principle: (Keep It Simple & Straightforward). We therefore created a ‘mini-website‘.
Below is a screenshot taken from the Google Analytics account. It is showing the Australian visitor traffic increases from just before we launched the new website, till the end of the festival event.
Strategic Website Writing
Because I do a lot of SEO work, and because I know that SEO directly involves creating excellent and strategic website content, myself and the client invested time and effort researching and then preparing these pages for the website:
- About Gayndah – www.orangefestival.com.au/about-gayndah
- Things to See and Do – www.orangefestival.com.au/visitor-information
We were not commissioned to do SEO work for this project, but out of curiosity I setup a project with our SEMRush account to track how the website ranked in Google.com.au organically without any actual SEO, once Google indexed the new website, including the above-mentioned pages.
The google.com.au organic rankings were not bad, not bad at all.
With some actual SEO work we would have got the website in position 1 or 2 for “where is Gayndah located”, “why travel to Gayndah” and other keyword phrases.
Getting the website into position 1 for “whats the population of Gayndah” was pretty good, considering no SEO work was actually done, especially also knowing it was a ‘mini-website’ using a ‘non-SEO website information architecture/sitemap’ method.
There is a big difference between website developers who know SEO, vs those that don’t. Those who do can build ‘SEO-ready websites’ that are primed to help with business growth. Those who don’t know how to do this, are essentially creating dead-fish websites. As an analogy, it’s the difference between someone who knows how to build a billy-cart, vs someone who knows how to build an entire car.Â
Case Study Metrics
For confidentiality I won’t be sharing actual metrics, KPI’s or analytics report data for this project. However I will say that the client was and is very happy with the website and our support during the project, during the event itself and after the event.
As per all our clients, this festival client is and was also aware that if they wanted a HEAP more event awareness, etc we could have put together a Growth Roadmap, then rolled-out highly effective Facebook Ads, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), maybe some Google Ads and a bunch of other things to gain very, very large volumes of website visitor traffic. We could also set up the website to sell merchandise and many other things.
If you are preparing a festival, and/or require a website to aid with your event, charity, NFP organisation, NGO, community group, club, etc and would like a great website (and maybe even some really great digital marketing), have a read through this grant-style offering that we at Green Valley Digital provide. There is an application process. This is an exclusive offer that is of great value and benefit.
Successful applicants receive amazing financial savings, a dedicated friendly expert team ready to serve, and a lot more.
PS. If you would like to read more about this particular festival website project that I have spoken about throughout this blog post, here is link to a page with more information.