How Propellic Helped Thrifty Traveler Increase Their Organic Traffic Volume By 1300% In Two Years

The Solution

It only made sense that Thrifty Traveler would turn to Google Search to find an agency that lived and breathed SEO.

They stayed away from the PPC ads and focused on the companies who were able to get top organic rankings for their own websites. If they could do it for themselves, that had to be a good sign.

As a front-page contender, Propellic stood out.

"Kudos to them." he says, "because as a relatively small company, they had managed to work their way into the top results of what we were searching for."

Their first engagement with Propellic was an SEO audit. From there, they learned what wasn't working on their site and what needed to be done to get it into a high-performing place.

Kyle and the entire Thrifty Traveler team were drawn to Propellic's thorough and transparent approach. He sat on many calls with Propellic's founder, Brennen Bliss, to go over valuable changes they should pursue - whether they ended up working together on an ongoing contract or not.

"Brennen very quickly got his arms around the problem and right away identified some potential changes - things we would never have dreamed of doing ourselves let alone thought it was something we needed to do."

The biggest idea that Brennen proposed was a massive restructuring of Thrifty Traveler's website, which at the time was home to over 7.000 URLs.

Due to a monstrous amount of redirects, Google wasn't indexing and ranking their existing content properly. Their impressive catalogue was going to waste since people couldn't find them in search.

But a site restructuring of this size came with risks.

"That was terrifying." Kyle laughs. "But Brennen was very upfront with us. He told us that the payoff could be huge, but there is also a chance that it could go poorly."

Armed with realistic expectations, they decided to pull the trigger and begin working with Propellic on this and other recommendations that surfaced from their initial audit.

The Results

Over the next two years, Kyle and the rest of the Thrifty Traveler team would see changes to the website (and company) that they never imagined.

"We're ranking for some top, high-demand keywords that we never could have dreamed of prior to working with Propellic.”

Since working with Propellic, the amount of organic traffic to their website has increased by 14x (that's a 1300% increase). On top of that, their top-ten ranking keywords increased from 5,000 to over 40,000.

""I hesitate to say these things because they can come across as too good to be true," he says. "But it really has been a game changer for our company.”

The growth in their web traffic also helped to fuel the growth in their company. Between the first and second year of working with Propellic, Thrifty Traveler hired 5 new employees - nearly doubling their size.

Of course, Propellic can't take all of the credit.

"Travel demand coming back is driving some of those results," he says. "But our work with Propellic before that happened helped ensure we were in a place where we could take advantage of that and build much stronger than we ever were prior to the pandemic.”

Kyle's team is also able to learn valuable SEO know-how through Propellic's one-to-one meetings and transparent reports.

Working directly with the SEOs on their account makes it possible to ask questions and gain skills that come into play daily.

"Learning these things on the fly and being able to implement them on a smaller scale for the things we're doing day in and day out has been absolutely invaluable," he says. "Beyond some of the really, really big changes we made early on with Propellic's help, that has been the biggest thing.

The role that Propellic played in Thrifty Traveler's growth was not only critical, but shocking, Kyle concludes.

"I don't think we ever fathomed that this is where we'd be at right now after working with Propellic.”

And now that people are putting travel back on their itinerary, Thrifty Traveler is there to help them do it smarter, better, and cheaper than ever before.