Getting them off rented demand.
Third party platforms are a fine way to fill a calendar and a poor way to build a business. Every direct booking is one that does not carry someone else’s commission.
Camper van hire ·Edinburgh
From no search presence to their own bookings.
Compass Rentals were renting camper vans through other people’s platforms because their own site brought in almost nothing. That is no longer the case.
0 to 3,000
Visitors a month
From a site that was bringing in next to nothing directly.
Direct
Bookings every month
Where the bookings used to arrive through somebody else’s platform.
Europe
Travel agent partnerships
Built alongside the SEO, not instead of it.
Client
Compass Rentals
Industry
Camper van hire (holiday rental)
Location
Edinburgh, customers across Europe
Services
SEO · Content · Links · Local · Partnerships
Renting vans on somebody else’s terms.
Compass Rentals hire out camper vans for holidays from Edinburgh. Their customers come from all over Europe: some local, some from elsewhere in the UK, many from further afield. Local intent, but with a reach well beyond the city.
When we started, they had effectively no search presence at all. Bookings were coming through third party rental platforms, which works right up until you notice how much of each booking never reaches you, and that the relationship belongs to the platform rather than to you.
To be fair to them, nothing had gone wrong. They simply had not done anything. The site had never been set up for search in the first place.
The same vans, booked directly.
No chart. The comparison is the chart.
Before
- Effectively no search presence
- Bookings dependent on third party rental platforms
- A website that had never been set up for search
- Almost nothing arriving directly
- No route to the European audience beyond the platforms
After
- 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a month
- Direct bookings arriving every month
- A site built to be found for the searches that matter
- A link profile built deliberately rather than by accident
- Travel agent partnerships across Europe, sending business directly
Three phases, one of which is not SEO at all.
The search work was necessary. It was not sufficient on its own for a business whose customers are spread across a continent.
Phase 01
Setting the site up to be found.
The foundations had never been laid. Structure, targeting and the technical basics came first, because no amount of promotion fixes a site that cannot be indexed and understood.
Phase 02
A link building campaign.
Building the authority to compete for holiday hire searches against established platforms with years of history behind them.
Phase 03
Partnerships with travel agents across Europe.
A deliberate campaign to build relationships with agents throughout Europe. Not an SEO tactic, but it puts the vans in front of exactly the people booking this kind of holiday.
The decisions that disproportionately mattered.
Three calls did most of the work.
Going where the bookings already are.
European travel agents already have the audience. Building those relationships alongside the search work compounds with it rather than competing for the same budget.
Local intent, continental reach.
The searches are local to Edinburgh. The people making them are not. Targeting only one of those would have left most of the market untouched.
The bit we would have started sooner.
Travel bloggers. There is a substantial community writing about exactly this kind of travel, and we are working through it now rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The value is doubled: the links raise visibility for the searches that already convert, and the coverage itself sends people who book directly. If we were starting this account again, that campaign would begin on day one.
Your version of this
Handing a cut of every booking to somebody else’s platform?
Send us your URL. We will run your site through the same first pass we ran on Compass Rentals, and send back a 15 minute video walkthrough of what we would do. Or whether we are the right people to do it.