Flight Centre is an Australian travel agency with more than 75,000 customers globally.
For Flight Centre, search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives often took a backseat to projects focused on increasing engagement and moving users through the conversion funnel. This left fewer resources for SEO testing.
With less available time and budget for strategic page improvements designed to improve the search visibility of high-value landing pages at the top of the conversion funnel, Flight Centre was at a disadvantage to competitors that could devote more resources to testing and implementing changes quickly.
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customer success story
Our key discovery
Some of the biggest SEO wins came from making life easier for searchers. For Flight Centre, putting key information front and center on mobile lifted organic traffic by 26%. Opening FAQs automatically added almost 8%, and a clearer link block added 10% on desktop.
Testing also showed the changes that weren't worth building. Of the proposed website changes, 75% made no measurable difference to organic traffic, so Flight Centre's engineers saved valuable time.
With SEO A/B testing, you ship the changes that earn their place.
The challenge
Before working with SearchPilot, Flight Centre’s SEO team had limited resources. The company’s SEO initiatives often took a backseat to other projects that aimed to increase user engagement and move users through the conversion funnel. For Flight Centre’s product, design, and engineering teams, the main focus was on creating new page elements and improving the website's functionality.
The emphasis on user experience (UX) improvements, while essential to Flight Centre’s goals, left fewer resources for SEO testing. This meant less time and budget for strategic page improvements to enhance the search visibility of high-value landing pages at the top of the conversion funnel. This put Flight Centre at a disadvantage, leaving it to compete for organic search rankings against competitors that could devote more resources to testing and implementing changes quickly.
The solutions
SEO wins without the engineering backlog
SearchPilot enabled Flight Centre’s SEO team to test hypotheses and implement winning changes without waiting for long development cycles.
By delivering detailed ideation and testing the highest-priority ideas, SearchPilot found ways to boost organic traffic without taking up engineering and design resources. This resulted in organic traffic gains as high as 26% from a single test.
Reducing engineering requests
Before working with SearchPilot, Flight Centre’s SEO team would submit its website change requests directly to the engineering team to build. With limited testing capabilities in place, the SEO team or the engineers could not know how successful these changes would be until after implementation. Even then, they could only measure roughly.
Using SearchPilot’s SEO testing platform, the team identified that 75% of proposed website changes had no measurable impact on organic traffic. By not rolling these out, the engineers saved valuable time.
Meaningful website improvements, better UX
Some of the SEO tests that achieved the most impactful results enhanced user experience and helped searchers achieve their goals more quickly. Bringing critical information nearer the top of the page, making FAQ content visible on page load, and simplifying link blocks all produced statistically significant winners for Flight Centre.
