A programmatic SEO strategy for Outbound Collective

The Outbound performs well in overall SEO rankings. We've made many improvements over the years with structured data, internal links, and the organization of adventure pages -- which make up a significant portion of organic traffic (users searching for specific places "Alamere Falls", "McWay Falls", etc).

Keyword research

I utilized SEMRush to assess the current state of our keyword rankings, evaluate competitors, and identify key areas for improvement.

I saw an opportunity to increase our coverage (and ranking) for more generalized search terms – acquire users earlier in their travel search journey. I wanted to acquire users when they were still at the planning stage, and looking for general inspiration. This meant we would need to win searches like 'best [activity] in [location].

Programmatic strategy

Because the Outbound was such a small team, we couldn't rely solely on editorial to target these kinds of searches. While we were able to address some of our key markets with custom editorial, I worked with our lead engineer to develop a programatic strategy in order to reach a wider swath of possible location searches.

We utilized a combination of geolocated data and internal curation to generate thousands of destination 'hubs' where we were confident that we had enough content nearby (depending on the activity) to have a competitive landing page.

Targeting specific queries

While programmatic strategies tackled many broader search terms with high volume, I also looked at how we performed in specific, targeted searches. These typically happen much further down the funnel, when folks are searching for *specific* hikes and activities.

This is the database of adventures that we've built with UGC over many, many years. While we had great content to perform in these queries, I re-worked the front-end of these pages to make sure that we formatted the information through established structured data schema.

Results

I closely monitored our organic traffic and keyword rankings over the next 6 months, continuing to make small changes as needed. Our efforts eventually led to a ~60% increase in organic traffic to the site, as well as significantly improved ranking for key terms like "hiking trails near me" and "hiking in [location]"