Rove Hotels

Background

Rove Hotels is a joint venture between Meraas and Emaar Properties PJSC. Rove Hotels defines a new niche in Dubai’s vibrant hospitality sector and are reliable, modern, fuss-free and super-efficient for those who lead fast-paced urban lives.

Rove Hotels has nine properties in well-connected locations across Dubai including Rove Downtown, Rove Healthcare City, Rove City Centre, Rove Trade Centre and Rove Dubai Marina. In late 2021 and 2022, the travel, leisure and hospitality industry was slowly being restored after the devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.  Nexa was tasked with creating a search marketing strategy that would help reset the Rove Hotels and take them back to the revenue and success they had experienced pre-covid.

This was a significant challenge, as travellers were still wary and cautious at this time. Added to this, the competition from not only other hotels but the dominant presence of online travel agencies such as Expedia, Booking.com and Hotels.com across the major search engines many of whom had increased search engine marketing activities in an attempt to regain lost business from the pandemic, created additional challenges that required an imaginative approach tailored to the strengths of the Rove Hotels brand and USPs.  Price sensitivity was also an issue with many hotels drastically reducing average room rates in order to drive occupancy.

Objectives:   

• Improve the current number of keywords ranking in top 10 - Both branded and non branded. Our goal was to have 900 keywords on the first page of Google SERPs in 12 months
• Visibility for localised keywords that target the specific localities of Rove Hotels locations
• Increase the number of referring domains for the Rove Hotels website from 1,000 to 1,200+
• Increase bookings and sales revenue from Organic search
• Increase the search impressions and clicks generated from blog posts in order to drive more organic traffic to the site
• Increase overall clicks and impressions of the website
• Increase website visits through GMB
• Increase overall search visibility for the Rove Hotels website

Challenges:  

• Difficulty in achieving top ranking for location-based keywords
• Traffic to the website was low and unqualified
• Other local hotels and the large, international Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) had already established a strong SEO presence over the years and the competition was palpable
• Covid-19 negatively impacted the business which caused them massive loss in revenue

Solution: 

• The team included targeted locations in the content of the website pages
• The team applied the research-based keywords and CTA titles across the website with vigorous A/B testing to measure the effectiveness of any changes
• User experience was dramatically improved by analysing over 600 hours of user sessions recordings and heatmap analysis that allowed us to understand specific user actions and helped us to identify areas of improvement.
• The team created over 120 helpful and informative blog articles based on local information near each hotel and targeted competitors generic keywords to rank.
• As the target audience is a global audience, we investigated opportunities from other Search engines and put a plan in place to rank on those too, targeted potential keywords which had high search volume and were not at all ranking.