Rentacheapie is a new client who is hoping to increase their visibility on Google searches (and hopefully Bing by default) in two main ways. First, on local search (by which I mean South African) and secondly, by attracting more Europeans. A pretty seasonal business, they mainly have Europeans in the summer, but want more of them in the off-peak winter along with more people in general.
Rentacheapie targets potential “car renters” and have a huge fleet of cars ranging from the standard VW Polo’s and Hyundai i20’s to 4×4’s and more expensive sedans. Again, it is fascinating to learn all about the industry (both of rental cars, and of tourism in Cape Town and South Africa) and see what things like a drought, or political decisions can make to it. If you add those to poor Google Rankings it can really spiral a company down but thankfully we are hoping to maintain their handle on the terms they already rank for, and then catapult them into the next level with the long-tail keywords they can so easily attain.
My feeling is this is going to be a long-term relationship that will (also) spiral into a myriad of exciting things. Stay tuned for more…
Update – a year later: These guys approached me when they fell to the 2nd page of google, and I had them back on the 1st page within 6 months. They were adamant they wanted to rank for ‘car rental cape town’ but I showed them the value of trying to rank for hundreds of other keywords. I developed a content strategy that created around 30 pieces of long-form content, and tied it together with a newsletter mailer through Mailchimp so that all that time and money wasn’t spent on organic traffic alone. The newsletter subscriber base grew rapidly, they started ranking for many related terms, and I oversaw the migration away from dinky old WordPress to a much better stack, on Sanity. Covid hit them hard and since stepping away in early 2020, I have little idea how they are faring today.