ASA Cultural Tours is an Australian cultural tours operator with over 40 years of experience running expert-led small group tours across regions, themes, and eras. Their audience is highly educated, predominantly over 65, and known to research heavily before booking. Customers who take one tour often book many more over their lifetime, which makes new-traveller acquisition the highest-value growth lever.
Non-branded organic sessions grew from 882 to 2,020 year on year, more than doubling the traffic reaching ASA from travellers who hadn’t heard of the brand before.
Top 3 keyword footprint grew from 175 to 253, exceeding the target set at outset.
#1 keyword rankings grew from 95 to 200, well beyond the target set at outset.
ASA had strong brand recognition and loyal repeat travellers, but almost all of the organic traffic reaching the site came from people who already knew the brand. Growth was capped at the size of the existing audience. Reaching new travellers meant showing up for the searches those travellers were actually running, before they had heard of ASA.
The path to non-branded growth was three connected workstreams: understand how ASA’s audience actually searches at every stage of the research cycle, fix the technical and structural issues suppressing rankings, and build authority through targeted outreach that mirrored where competitors were already visible.
Every meaningful growth decision came out of research. We mapped how ASA’s audience actually searches, from destination-level queries through theme-based terms (history, food, art, archaeology) to long-tail comparison questions travellers ask when evaluating operators. This pulled together Google Ads search term data, Google Search Console queries, and Semrush data to produce a keyword universe of over 600 terms across all stages of the research cycle. With 30 to 40 tours a year across multiple regions and themes, this depth of research was the only way to give every piece of content and every category page a defensible reason to exist.
The initial technical audit surfaced a full sweep of foundational issues, from missing H1s to duplicate content and titles, which we resolved in priority order. From there the work moved to site speed, image optimisation (image search is a real traffic source for cultural tours), and structural improvements to how the site was organised. In parallel we restructured the Regions, Tours, and Themes category pages so each one targeted a specific intent segment, and reinstated a dormant category that had lost significant traffic, rebuilding it with new content and a fresh internal linking structure.
Content strategy was handed back to ASA’s writers, who are all academics, with a data layer added on top. We supplied them with which existing articles had traffic worth preserving so those could be repurposed with clearer intent, and briefed new pieces off the keyword research so every article had a defensible reason to exist. On the authority side, we ran a competitor link gap analysis rather than generic outreach. That surfaced domains where competitors already had placements but ASA didn’t, and we worked through that list systematically to land placements on relevant travel and lifestyle publications.
The campaign hit every target set at outset and continued growing past them. Non-branded traffic more than doubled year on year, top 3 rankings grew past the 250 target, and #1 rankings landed at 200 against a target of 120.
Non-branded organic sessions grew from 882 to 2,020 year on year, more than doubling the traffic reaching ASA from travellers who hadn’t heard of the brand before. This is the traffic that matters most for ASA because it represents travellers who found the brand for the first time through search, rather than people who already knew to look for ASA by name.
Top 3 keyword rankings grew from 175 to 253, exceeding the 250 target with room to spare. The footprint spans destination, theme, and comparison queries across the full research cycle.
#1 keyword rankings grew from 95 to 200, well beyond the 120 target set at outset. This represents the point at which ASA is not just visible in search but is the answer for a growing share of the queries that matter.
“We have been working with Joel and the team at JBE for some time now. They took the time to understand our business and maximise our exposure. Not understanding the full SEO picture, we found Joel to be patient and instructive. Collaborating with JBE has been a positive experience and online visibility and new leads have increased. This has been a great partnership and I can highly recommend Joel and the team at JBE.”
Sandra
ASA Cultural Tours
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