Case Study: Hudson River Cruises

Client Overview

Hudson River Cruises is a cruise company that has been providing day cruises on the Hudson River waterfront out of Kingston NY for more than 20 years. Clientele includes casual visitors and sightseers, charter events for company gatherings, private parties, and weddings.

Beginning with basic search optimization practices, work on the Hudson River Cruises website included updates in many areas, from modification of the navigation structure to fresh text and copy. All changes were made within the parameters of a content management environment.

Results of Search Engine Optimization Plan

• Search Engine Placements: Increased number of top-10 positions from 87 to 125. The site currently enjoys 8 number 1 placements for the keywords chosen.
• Realized a first-time presence for many important industry keywords, such as 'hudson river fall foliage cruise', 'hudson river day cruise' and 'hudson river boating'
• Visits to the site increased 229% from July 2007 to July 2008, and the number of unique visitors increased 206%!
• Bounce Rate was 65% at the beginning of May, and decreased from 40.6% at the end of the first 3 months of SEO, to an impressive 37.66% at the end of October.

Keyword Placement Highlights

• 1 in Google for 'hudson river cruise', number 3 for 'hudson river day cruise'
• 1 in Yahoo for 'cruises on hudson river from kingston ny', and number 3 for 'hudson valley cruise tour'
• 1 in Live for 'hudson river fall foliage cruise', and number 2 for 'hudson river boating'

Campaign Summary

Among the challenges to updating this site: making the necessary changes required while maintaining the personal, one-on-one feeling Hudson River Cruises has been providing its visitors. Thorough and thoughtful application of SEO in conjunction with new text, navigation and optimization of images has gone a long way toward accomplishing that goal. Ongoing quarterly optimization will ensure that updates to SEO are current and relevant to changing search practices.

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