One of our long-time clients has owned the domain caravansales.com.au for a very long time. It’s a great domain with a long history and quite a good amount of traffic (in the order of 10,000 visits a month). They had known for some time that it would be a good domain to turn into a listing website, to take on the likes of Caravan & Camping Sales, or Trade RV. This year we launched that website and have been happily part of its tremendous growth.
Launching CaravanSales.com.au
As we said, there was an existing website at caravansales.com.au. That website had pages and posts and archive pages that drew a lot of traffic. One of our jobs was to make sure we kept that traffic during the transition. This was a matter of taking existing content over to the new website where possible, or creating new content and/or redirections where it was not. The new website is a place where anyone can list their caravan, whereas the old website belonged specifically to a caravan dealer. They wanted, therefore, the divorce the new website from them as much as possible. That added a layer of complexity to the project because we couldn’t necessarily bring over the previous content. We did bring over two very highly rated posts (one on smoke alarms and another on caravan stats) because the content was universal in nature and not specific to the dealership. We also created new archive pages and post for other content.
Growth of the website
If there is one thing we all know about Google, it’s that Google loves content. When the website was opened up to everyone to list a caravan on, the content grew exponentially. As a result, our traffic also grew exponentially. For several months we saw 40% growth. Those giddy days tapered off and now we’re faced with the limitless possibilities of growing our website further, from optimizing existing pages to creating new pages and posts.
Meanwhile, over at gccaravans.com.au...
The dealership at Gold Coast Caravans needed to move its website to a new domain. We selected gccaravans.com.au for that. We migrated their existing website to the new domain and now we have to establish its domain authority and grow the traffic to the levels they used to get on caravansales.com.au. That will be a long term process but we’re getting great results so far.
One of the areas the previous domain dominated was searches for consignment caravans. That search term is particularly important right now because stock is limited Australia-wide. They used to enjoy number one spot Australia-wide. We’ve recovered the local searches but still need to do some work on getting better coverage around Australia.
