+10M € revenue thanks to international SEO strategy
About Air Europa
Air Europa, the airline division of Globalia, was founded in 1986 and has established itself as one of the most modern airlines in Europe and as a reference airline between Europe and America. The airline operates scheduled domestic services and scheduled long-haul services to North and South America from its main base in Madrid. The airline exceeded €2 billion turnover in 2022.
Challenge
In 2017, Air Europa was already one of the most highly-rated airlines in terms of brand image and service offerings at national and international level. Its main problem lay in the absence of a global SEO strategy that would allow it to increase its share of organic traffic in the 22 markets in which the airline operated.
The share of branded SEO traffic in 2017 was over 90%, revealing severe visibility issues for generic keywords. In addition, the airline had serious crawlability and indexing issues due to the lack of a CMS to optimise transactional URLs focused on direct sales.
Main Goals
- Design and execute the International SEO strategy focused on 22 markets and 8 languages
- Reconceptualise the airline's transactional SEO architecture by major routes
- Increase the poor share of generic SEO traffic derived from keywords from the main destinations.
SEO approach & Steps taken
Destination landing pages
After analysing the transactional search patterns on flights globally, a landing page structure was proposed that would follow the 6 main search patterns detected in each of the 22 markets studied: Flights to City, Flights from City, Flights from City to City, Flights from City to City, Flights from Country, Flights to Country and Flights from Country to Country.
International Keyword Research
Based on the above semantic structure, the next challenge was to carry out thorough international keyword research in order to detect specific local patterns related to the purchase of flights in Google SERPs. After weeks of intensive work, keyword research was completed that reflected local particularities in purchase intent in the 22 markets in which the airline operated.
On page Optimization
Based on the previous keyword analysis, we worked on the definition and optimisation of the SEO On-Page logics customised by language and specific market. The objectives were clear: to adapt local search trends to Air Europa's on-page SEO, increase the organic CTR in each of the markets and maximise the share of organic sales through the airline's direct channel.
Technical SEO Control
A project of this nature could not have been carried out without a thorough technical SEO analysis to ensure the correct indexing of the new URLs. The following lines of work were carried out: optimisation of the crawl budget, canonicalisation to avoid duplicate content, fine-tuning of generic sitemaps and sitemaps by specific market, automated internal linking modules and inclusion of microformats using Schema.org to increase CTR in SERPs.
Internal Linking
Given the complexity and scope of the project, indexing more than 15,000 URLs in a short period of time required the fine-tuning of ingenious SEO practices focused on optimising the website's internal linking. Special emphasis was placed on:
- Internal linking between transactional URLs following near destination logics.
- Internal linking from informational URLs (Blog) to new transactional landings.
- Hierarchical internal linking by main destinations in menus, submenus and footer.
Link Building
In order to support the SEO strategy and accelerate the increase in SEO rankings in the 22 markets analysed, a link-building strategy was implemented with generic anchors based on the main transactional logics: "flights to {city}" and "flights from {city} to {city}". To this end, Air Europa's local delegations supported us, thanks to which we identified a series of media and publications with which we worked on external linking in each specific market.
+10M € revenue SEO thanks to International SEO strategy
"During the more than 6 months that the project to create and fine-tune Air Europa's destination landings lasted, Sebas demonstrated his unquestionable technical SEO and content strategy knowledge. Without a doubt, we are lucky to have been able to count on a professional like him"
Results
+ 10M €
organic revenue
Thanks to the design of the new commercial SEO strategy by target landings, it was possible to achieve a revenue per SEO channel of more than €10M during the first year and a half of the project's launch.
+ 50 K
Business keywords ES Market
During the first two years of the launch, 50,000 new keywords were positioned with clear transactional intent combining generic flight search + destination logics.
+ 40% growth
SEO Generic traffic
One of the main SEO objectives of the project was achieved: to reverse the poor performance in search engines for generic transactional traffic coinciding with the routes on which the airline operated.
+ 15 K
Business Keywords in US Market
In the US market, one of the airline's key markets, 15,000 new business keywords were positioned, coinciding with the main routes between European and American destinations.
Air Europa Business Case
Increased sales through SEO channels thanks to the development of an international SEO strategy.