Case Study · Tourism / Safari
We made organic search the biggest source of enquiries - and made it provable.
A luxury safari operator with a portfolio of high-end camps across southern Africa, selling through enquiry. Six months of fractional SEO, analytics and conversion work rebuilt the organic foundation, stood up trustworthy measurement, and held rankings through two Google core updates. (Anonymised client.)
Client: Luxury safari operator – high-end camps across southern Africa (anonymised) · Engagement: December 2025 – May 2026 · Sector: Tourism / Safari
Scope: Fractional SEO · analytics & measurement · conversion rate optimisation
The headline numbers
51%
Of all enquiries come from organic search – double all paid combined
+26%
Page-one keyword footprint (2,733 → 3,442)
+53% vs −14%
Clicks on pages we fixed vs the rest of the site
−99%
Crawl-wasting redirects (3,200 → 29)
Google Search Console (US) and GA4. Footprint compared Sep–Nov 2025 vs Apr–Jun 2026; enquiry share Feb–Jun 2026.
The challenge
Safari guests don’t add a camp to a cart – they enquire, often months ahead and after long research. Organic search is central to how prospective guests discover the brand, yet the site carried the typical debt of a large, long-running WordPress estate: wasted crawl budget, orphaned content, toxic backlinks – and analytics that couldn’t be trusted to answer a simple question: how many enquiries is each channel actually producing?
The remit went beyond rankings: rebuild the organic foundation, put trustworthy measurement in place, and improve how the site turns visitors into enquiries.
The approach - measurement first, then growth
Analytics & measurement.
Consolidated competing GA4 data streams into a single source of truth, then implemented enquiry-funnel tracking from page view to completed submission – giving the client, for the first time, a clean read on how many enquiries each channel produces. Plus GA4 explorations and an AI Visibility report.
Search (SEO).
Rebuilt the technical foundation: crawl-wasting redirects cut from 3,200 to 29 (−99%), the XML sitemap rebuilt and resubmitted, robots.txt and an llms.txt added, 404s and broken links fixed. Reconnected 96 high-priority orphaned pages into the internal-link structure, disavowed 146 toxic referring domains across two backlink audits, and built a USA keyword map on a pillar-cluster model to steer content.
Conversion (CRO).
Hotjar heatmaps and session recordings across the enquiry page, homepage and priority camp pages; an exit-intent survey for qualitative feedback; two CRO reports and a per-camp Conversion Journey Analysis.
The results
Organic is the business’s primary lead engine.
Once enquiry tracking was live, the picture was unambiguous: across February–June 2026, organic search produced 51% of the total – more than every other channel combined, and more than double all paid media.
A wider organic footprint.
Comparing the quarter before the engagement with the most recent quarter, US keywords ranking on page one grew from 2,733 to 3,442 (+26%), with the top-20 footprint up +25% – the leading indicator that precedes traffic, reflecting the reconnected pages and cleaner crawl.
The gains tracked our work.
To separate impact from seasonality and algorithm noise, we isolated the 96 pages we reconnected and compared them with the rest of the site over the same window. The pages we touched grew organic clicks +53% while the rest of the site declined −14% – the gains moved with our work, not the market.
Resilience through volatility.
Two Google core updates rolled out inside the measurement window – periods when many sites lost ground. Through both, average position, organic footprint and enquiry volume held. In this market, growing footprint while defending rankings through back-to-back core updates is a strong result in its own right.
“Rankings you can’t tie to enquiries are trivia. We built the measurement first – so every gain that followed was provable, page by page, channel by channel.”
– Backbone Studios
Why it matters
Tourism brands that sell through enquiry live or die on discovery – being found by the right traveller, months before they commit to an experience they can’t feel until they arrive. This engagement shows Backbone’s intelligence layer doing exactly that: fix how the brand is found, measure what actually produces enquiries, and defend it through whatever Google does next. No vanity metrics – every claim above is traceable to a number the client can verify.
Built for Impact.