Travel & Tourism SEO Case Study

12 months, 5× organic traffic for Indonesia's tailor-made tour specialist.

Come 2 Indonesia has planned private and small-group trips across the islands since 2007, but most travelers found its competitors first. Our goal was to win the destination, itinerary and trip-planning searches that come before a booking, in a market dominated by global travel platforms.
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See How It Works
Organic traffic
10K → 50K
+ 0 %

Sessions

7K → 49K

+ 0 %

Total users

6K → 46K

+ 0 %
Keywords in top 3

30 → 131

+ 0 %
The client

About Come 2 Indonesia

Come 2 Indonesia is a local travel agency based in Indonesia. It designs tailor-made private tours, shared group trips, day trips and multi-day itineraries across 17 destinations, from Bali and the Gili Islands to Komodo, Borneo, Sulawesi, Papua and the Moluccas. Its best-known trips include orangutan houseboat journeys in Tanjung Puting, Komodo and Labuan Bajo cruises, and Bromo and Ijen volcano tours. It also books domestic flights, fast boats and transfers, and offers MICE, incentive and B2B services for travel agencies.
Its travelers include honeymooners, families, divers, surfers, wildlife lovers and adventure seekers, many of them Spanish speakers. They spend weeks researching routes before they book, and those research searches were where the site fell short. Even with a Tripadvisor Travelers’ Choice award and nearly two decades of local expertise, global booking platforms and large tour sites outranked it on the searches that mattered most.
Bali tours
Komodo & Labuan Bajo trips
Borneo orangutan houseboats
Bromo & Ijen tours
Gili & Nusa islands
Tailor-made itineraries
Honeymoon packages
Diving & surf trips
MICE & incentive travel
B2B receptive services
LOCATIONS – Indonesia (17 destinations), targeting international travelers searching in English and Spanish
Services delivered – Technical SEO, on-page SEO, content and keyword strategy, off-page and link building, GA4 measurement
Timeframe – 12-month comparison, July 2025 vs. July 2026
Scale – 17 destinations, 17+ trip types, 17K ranking keywords at close
Scope of work

6 problems between a local Indonesia expert and page one

Come 2 Indonesia had the expertise, the reviews and the itineraries, but it won only a small share of searches for Indonesian travel.
Visibility

10K organic visits a month for a 17-destination tour operator

For a company covering all of Indonesia, organic traffic was very low. Most travelers planning a trip there landed on large booking sites and travel marketplaces instead.

Rankings

12K ranking keywords, but only 30 in the top 3

The site ranked for thousands of terms, but nearly all of them sat on pages two and three. Searches from people ready to book rarely reached the top positions that get clicks.

Authority

An Authority Score of 8 against global travel platforms

Up against Viator, GetYourGuide, Klook and large tour marketplaces, the site had too few good links from travel publications, blogs and tourism directories to win competitive terms.

Technical health

Heavy sliders and images slowing every page

Large hero sliders, uncompressed destination photos and render-blocking scripts made pages slow, especially on mobile. Google also wasted crawl time on the English/Spanish structure.

On-page

Destination and trip-type pages competing with each other

With 17 destinations and 17+ trip types, many pages targeted the same terms. Titles, headings and image alt text were generic and not mapped to keywords.

Content

No pages answering how travelers actually plan

There was little content on itineraries, the best time to visit, how to get there or entry requirements: the searches travelers make weeks before choosing a tour operator.

How we did it

The 6-phase build, in the order it had to happen

In travel SEO, order matters. Speed and crawl issues had to be fixed before new content could rank, and every destination and trip-type page needed a clear target keyword before we built itineraries and guides on top of it.

01 – Assessment

Keyword research and intent mapping

We mapped search demand in English and Spanish across all 17 destinations and trip types, grouped terms by intent (planning, comparison, booking) and gave each keyword group one page, so the site's pages stopped competing with each other.

02 – Diagnosis

Technical SEO and crawl control

We compressed destination images, cut slider and script weight, fixed hreflang between the English and Spanish versions, cleaned up sitemaps and added tour, breadcrumb and FAQ schema.

03 – Alignment

On-page optimization of tour and destination pages

We rewrote titles, meta descriptions and headings on the main tour and destination pages, replaced generic alt text, and added the duration, highlights and itinerary details travelers search for.

04 – Mobilisation

Internal linking and destination architecture

Each destination hub now links to its tours, trip types and guides, and blog posts link back to the tours that convert, passing authority from guide content to bookable pages.

05 – Strengthening

Content development and off-page link outreach

We published itinerary guides, best-time-to-visit pages and destination guides, and earned links from travel blogs, tourism directories and niche publications, raising Authority Score from 8 to 30.

06 – Maintenance

Measurement in GA4 and monthly iteration

Each month we tracked rankings, organic sessions and engagement in GA4 and Semrush, refreshed weak pages and shifted effort to the destinations and trip types growing fastest.

Results — before vs. after

4 metrics, 12 months, every one up

Twelve months of focused travel SEO grew visibility, engagement and domain authority.

Sessions

49K
+600%

Total users

46K
+666.7%

Event count

60K
+650%

Authority Score

30
275%

×5

Five times the organic traffic and 131 terms in Google's top 3

Over 12 months, organic traffic grew from 10K to 50K, an increase of 400%. Ranking keywords grew from 12K to 17K, and keywords in Google’s top 3 more than quadrupled, from 30 to 131. Engagement grew even faster: total users went from 6K to 46K, sessions from 7K to 49K and event count from 8K to 60K, so the new visitors were actively exploring tours and itineraries. With Authority Score up from 8 to 30, the site now competes for terms that used to be out of reach.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLEJul 2025Jul 2026CHANGE
Organic traffic (Semrush)10K50K+400%
Organic keywords12K17K+41.7%
Keywords in top 330131+336.7%
Authority Score830+275%
Total users6K46K+666.7%
Sessions 7K49K+600%
Event count 8K60K+650%

Google analytics GA4

SEMrush Organic traffic

semrush organic keywords

Google rankings

[10] high-intent Indonesia travel keywords at position [#1]

Travelers make these planning and booking searches before they choose who will guide their trip, and Come 2 Indonesia now ranks at the top for them.
KEYWORDSMONTHLY VOLUMEBEFOREAFTER
Indonesia tour packages2,400NA#1
Indonesia travel5,400NA#1
Indonesia tours1,900NA#1
Bali tour packages6,600NA#1
Indonesia vacation packages1,000NA#1
Komodo Island tours1,300NA#1
Borneo orangutan tour880NA#1
Sumatra orangutan tour590NA#1
Indonesia adventure tours480NA#1
Indonesia diving tours390NA#1
Audience insight

What the traffic data showed

Device usage

[Mobile or desktop share from GA4, plus one sentence on what it means for how travelers research trips.]

Demographics

[Top countries from GA4, e.g. Spain, the US and the UK, with growing traffic from Latin America.]

Key Results

Successfully ranked #1 on Google

Rank #1

12 months, 131 top-3 rankings, and a market where one booking is a two-week itinerary

Travel SEO is won while people are still researching. Someone who finds you through an itinerary or destination guide months before departure is the person who books a tailor-made trip of several weeks, and for a local operator each of those bookings is worth far more than a single day tour.

Own the planning search, own the booking

We targeted itinerary, best-time-to-visit and destination-guide searches and linked each one to a bookable tour.

Technical first, content second

We fixed page speed, hreflang and crawl issues before publishing, so new content could rank quickly.

Authority from the right sources

Links from travel blogs, tourism directories and destination publications took Authority Score from 8 to 30.

Measured monthly

GA4 and Semrush ranking reviews set the priorities for each month's work.

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