Case Studies
Sonesta + Redlion Websites Migration
My Role: Senior Digital Content Manager at Sonesta
Goal: Merge two substantial brand/e-commerce websites to collectively
sell hotels and hotel brands as part of the "One Sonesta" digital experience
initiative. Maintain site traffic and growth, ensure brand equity, and
align content and CMS needs for seamless transition. Accomplish within
the 8-month raod map time frame. Leverage as 2024's most critical success
for company's digital transformation.
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Strategy: Leverage our existing tools, ecosystems, knowledge, skills,
and resources to be agile and create efficient work streams against road
map. Partner with development, PMs, and extended SMEs and stakeholders to
establish thorough expertise and input. Keep a proactive and flexible
mindset to adapt during roadblocks, push backs, and unforeseen issues.
Tactics/Action: Aligning with my team and partners was a number one step.
We came together to understand road map timelines and sprint planning,
roles and responsibilities, roadblocks to tackle or plan around, and what
training would be needed for different team members to execute tasks.
When the road map timeline and milestones were established, I worked
backwards from those dates, built in deadlines for myself and my team, and
planned buffer time for any executions I knew to be less predictable or prone
to issues. Intentional meetings, reviews, process updates, and the like were
planned by me and in collaboration with partners.
I led as the SME on our content development, processes, and CMS ecosystem. This meant I championed all my team's needs to execute successfully and proactively raised issues. As this lead, I was also the main point of contact and coordinator for managing the contributions we needed from partners and stakeholders. If we had bugs or development needs, business cases were brought up and followed through until resolution with IT. When we required our various marketing, commercial, distribution, and extended teams to contribute, I coordinated the needs, communication, timing, and expectations.
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My most critical tactic was maintaining an "all hands on deck" mentality across my team. No task was too small or out of scope for anyone to jump in and handle. If I needed to do minor copyediting while also handling the big picture, I made sure that was accomplished. When I needed my team to handle unexpected issues or step in on something atypical to their function, they also made themselves ready and available. Support was provided from all sides towards the end goal.
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Result:
- The content team's responsibilities and executions met the site merge date with minimal roll over of non-critical items to finalize post merge.
- Brand equity across site was met to enable a successful cross sell of hotels and brands, as well as cohesive marketing and promotional initiatives. ABVI brand saw extensive visibility and offer revenue growth.
- Site traffic was maintained and hit the predicted uptick in growth a month after merge.
- 404 issues were quickly fixed before merge or directly following; kept a 99 health score in Ahrefs.
- Hotels are now merchandised much more effectively with enhanced taglines, image and search functionality, formatting, SEO tactics, offer participation, and more.
- Merged "One Sonesta" site was rolled out as a key success for 2024 and critical component for future growth via company communications, PR channels, and most notably during 2024 conference.
Sonesta.com SEO Content Strategy (Q4 2022 - Q1 2024)
My Role: Senior Digital Content Manager at Sonesta
Goal: Increase non-branded organic traffic, keywords, and search rankings.
Enhance hotels visibility. Improve site health and UX experience. Lay found-
ational groundwork to continually improve and grow from essentially ground
up following early '22 sonesta.com platform change, where only passive
SEO existed.
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Foundational Strategy: Used data to make intentional decisions and put
focus on high performing and achievable areas of optimization first for
scaling. Collaborated to create expert SEO copy and content to target
keywords while maintaining brand voice and style guidelines. Encouraged
hotels to opt into a full-scale SEO strategy to optimize their pages.
Collaborated with web product team to tackle roadblocks for content
creation and site optimization. Formed robust and holistic metrics to
measure performance.
Content Strategy: Deployed an "inside out" approach where we eliminated
multiple pages fighting for same SEO attention by creating and continuously
refining Interest-Location pages (i.e. Extended Stay Hotels in Atlanta) and
City, POI, Airport, and similar location pages. We also reoptimized hotels
pages through a basic clean up or via full strategy dependent on hotel.
Our agency handled obtaining backlinks.
Tactics/Action: With assistance from our SEO agency partner, we leveraged
tools including Ahrefs, Google Analytics/GA4, Google Search Console,
Google Trends, and more to research the best, highly targeted opportunities
and construct data analysis.
We prioritized all the keyword, location, and topic opportunities to optimize
and begin creating content around. This included the development of key
interest and interest-location page, city pages, and more. It also allowed us
to prioritize hotels with the greatest opportunity and work with field
marketing to showcase ROI and get them opted in for full strategies.
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A key tactic to our content strategy was tapping into opportunities of
achievable growth, meaning we did not go to bat with highly competitive
keywords or topics. For example, even with many Disney hotels, we instead
optimized around other attractions or interests like Extended Stay or Pet
Friendly vs Disney keywords, which were too difficult to rank for.
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Together we developed calendars, wrote and edited the copy, and built the content out on the website. We employed an extensive amount of cross-linking and promotion throughout the site as well to give weight to the pages. Knowing these were heavy lifts with maintenance over time, we deployed and trained additional content assistants.
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In collaboration with web product team, we listened to our agency to prioritize the most critical bugs and technical site roadblocks impacting SEO health and performance. I helped with solutioning, follow up, and QA.
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We met on a weekly basis to plan and manage, and on a monthly basis to evaluate overall performance and content efforts. Separately, we provided analysis for hotels enrolled in independent reporting.
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Result:
- Despite some roadblocks such as technical site issues and cannibalization, by end of 2023 we achieved a 43.5% overall increase in non-branded organic traffic.
- While varying by month and seasonality, we also saw a 21% increase in keywords YOY.
- 315+ fully optimized pages were written and built by end of 2023; Success of these pages lead to an increase in '24, including testing and prototyping programmatic SEO for 2025.
- All hotels received at minimum basic SEO optimization, while 98 hotels received a full advanced strategy; results varied, but by comparison of basic and advanced, the advanced always showed better results. At least 20 advanced strategy hotels are already opting in for re-optimization efforts in late '24 through 2025.
- 60+ technical issues were fixed, resolving a variety of roadblocks, but also driving site health from 68 to 97 in Ahrefs
smarTours Blog
My Role: Marketing Content Manager at smarTours
Goal: Create SEO-rich content that drives traffic to the website
and blog pieces that augment the greater marketing goals,
customer journey, and audience engagement.
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Strategy: Build out consistent and authentic blog pieces that can
be holistically used across web, email, social, tour documents,
and sales. Keep a focus on greater marketing/promotion goals,
SEO, and what resonates with and persuades customers.
Tactics/Action: I began by researching industry trends and using data to determine destinations and topics of interest to the customer base. I then developed a comprehensive calendar that aligned blog content with promotional, marketing, sales, and PR goals. The calendar system also planned out content creation timelines and distribution on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
A crucial part to crafting successful content was hiring seasoned freelance writers to contribute blog pieces in addition the ones I was writing. After hiring them, I provided them with guidelines and framework for them to follow, which included SEO keywords and phrases. I also managed and edited them throughout their writing process.
I worked closely with the email marketing manager to funnel the right content to the right people at the right time. I also leveraged blog content on social media to drive engagement and nurture leads. Additionally, I teamed up with operations to develop and deliver upgraded tour documents that enhanced the customer’s experience, excitement, and preparedness leading up to their trips. Sales agents were also able utilize blog content as a tactic to convert leads.
Result:
- 20,000+ page views to blog content alone in the first four months after launch (successful against overall monthly web traffic of 55,000-65,000 page views).
- Search rankings for targeted topics reached between the 10th and 20th position after the first six months.
- Original blog content aided in the 1000% increase in social media engagement.
- Refreshed tour documents allowed customers to not only get more excited about their upcoming trips, but learn more about the destination and logistics, which lowered the number of inquiry calls of already booked customers.
La Quinta Digital Integration
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My Role: Digital Copywriter at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
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Goal: Efficiently integrate La Quinta’s 900+ hotel properties
onto Wyndham’s site and rebrand as La Quinta by Wyndham
on the site.
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Strategy: In close collaboration with the greater digital
marketing team, we developed a robust five-month production
schedule and incorporated tight timelines to reach hard
deadlines. We also made this project our number one priority
with the support of our leadership.
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Tactics/Action: In the few weeks leading up to this project launch, we made sure we understood the timeline and goals, and shifted our workload accordingly. Because the copy team's main role was to completely rewrite each LQ property page for the Wyndham site, our director hired a team of 12 freelancers to do a majority of the writing. I took on 5-7 of the freelancers to edit and manage every week, in addition to the property pages I was writing and our ongoing work.
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Each week we ensured our freelancers were staying on top of deadlines and adhering to the brand voice, style guidelines, and SEO practices. We continually met with the greater marketing team to track progress and make sure our workloads were balanced. Over the course of the five months, we stuck to our deadlines, helped each other out during hectic times, put in extra hours, and kept in close communication.
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I also personally worked with LQ brand marketers to craft the refreshed brand voice for LQ on the Wyndham site. This required creative brainstorms, an overhaul of their former brand pages, and the creation of new pages.
Result: Our copy team met each weekly deadline despite overall shifts in production schedule, and because of this, we beat our original final deadline. This allowed us to have ample time for reviews and implementation. It also enabled us to get ahead on marketing projects we had on hold. The LQ brand team was also thrilled with their new branding on the Wyndham website, which they widely promoted.
Merck Oncology Lung Cancer Awareness Month Puzzle Game
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My Role: Assistant Account Manager at The SPI Group
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Goal: In honor of Lung Cancer Awareness Month, the Merck Oncology communications team wanted to create a fresh, creative, and educational way to get Oncology colleagues and teams engaged and involved.
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Strategy: Use gamification to create interactive puzzles that the Oncology community could do both online and in person. I partnered with a senior account manager, designer, and programmer to carry out the project. Our approach included a great deal of creative brainstorming, thorough planning, and hands-on project management.
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Tactics/Action: After deciding on developing interactive puzzles, we nailed down all the specifics needed for design, copy, programming, implementation, testing, and promotion. I built out comprehensive calendars to streamline the process, provide each team member with deadlines, and effectively track progress. I also made sure we continually communicated with the Merck comms team to get approvals, provide updates, and address any issues. We allowed time for design and copy changes, programming challenges, and testing. We also created a plan and timeline for promotion, distribution, and change management of the puzzles throughout the course of Lung Cancer Awareness Month.
In terms of design for the puzzles, we decided to release a new one every week that when pieced together presented important information about lung cancer in a visually appealing way.
For platform design, we worked with Merck’s creative center to utilize an internal web page to house the gameboard, which made it easy to link to and distribute. The gameboard featured a space to piece the puzzles together, different difficulty levels, and a sidebar to choose a puzzle to do and tease the upcoming ones. To make it even more enticing and engaging, we made it competitive with a leader board that tracked fastest puzzle solve times.
To promote and share the game, we teased it in newsletters, internal social communities, town hall meetings, and even leadership communication in the two weeks leading up to Lung Cancer Awareness Month. We continued that approach throughout the awareness month, especially to promote the new puzzle released each week. We made sure the game was usable on Merck iPads so that the comms team could create a booth in their building were employees could stop by and solve the puzzles on the iPads during different events throughout the month.
Result: The puzzles were a resounding success with 700-1,000+ players each week. It created a new opportunity for employees to get engaged in a fun, yet educational way. It boosted engagement in the social communities, as people wanted to share their scores and encourage others to play and compete. A significant result of this project was the excitement from the client for the work we did. This was a Q4 project, so it aided in the comms team increasing their yearly budget with us, and requesting us to work on more similar projects.
Alcon.com Feature Stories
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My Role: Assistant Account Manager at The SPI Group
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Goal: Plan out a full calendar year of feature stories for
the company website. The stories needed to be unique, inventive,
fun, engaging, and educational. The Alcon communications team
wanted fresh stories that would be shareable on social media and
help showcase the company’s expertise and personality.
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Strategy: Brainstorm a wide range of story ideas for an entire year
and use our agency’s expert editorial, planning, and social media skills
to write, organize, and share stories.
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Tactics/Action: As the leader of this project, I began by researching more about the company, the eye care industry, and important topics for their customers. I also factored in major events, awareness days, and holidays they like to form content around. I brainstormed with my fellow colleague on numerous stories and built out an entire year-long calendar filled with weekly/biweekly stories. We brought an extremely creative and original approach to each story—from writing about micropsia and macropsia with an Alice in Wonderland story to exploring the eyesight of dinosaurs.
Result: The client was looking for our agency to be extremely hands on and take this load of their plate. They were extremely pleased with the story ideas, thorough planning we did, and writing we did. It contributed to engagement growth on social media and opened a pathway for the company to share ideas and knowledge in an authentic way.
In addition to the client being happy with our work, we also won an award for these feature stories! So I guess you could say I’m an award-winning writer!
