The Paddocks Luxury Cat Hotel – not your ordinary cattery
I was contacted by Nickie Dean at the beginning of 2020 to originally help with the companies onsite SEO for The Paddocks Luxury Cat Hotel. I went out and met Paul who took me around the cattery and I was impressed with the quality that they were providing… far superior than most catteries I had seen in the past.
Opened in 2019, to their own bespoke design, the business had seen good growth but during the off-peak season had not many bookings. Also, whilst the business were ranking well for Preston, they were not ranking well for other local geographic locations.
I was tasked with helping the business rank in these local towns and villages whilst also promoting the business over their social media platforms.
A difficult start…
When I first started working with The Paddocks, the biggest difficulty we were experiencing was the original website. Based on an older template, the site was slow and clunky. This was causing UX issues – no doubt causing some visitors to move immediately away as they waited for the page to load.
Also, the template used was not ideal for editing design.
At this stage, we had to make a decision – push through and try to do our best with the poor foundation, or to build the site from the ground up. After discussion with Nickie and Paul, we decided that the best way forward and to give the business a better chance of ranking and keeping visitors on site was to rebuild the site completely.
The website rebuild
We needed something modern and clean to compliment the business. It needed to look great on the eye and load quickly. We also wanted to have specific landing pages for each of those locations we were looking at around Preston.
We settled on the current design. Thankfully, Nickie and Paul had some great images of the cattery and these really are visually impressive – and a great way to show off the cattery to it’s full glory.
Lockdown chaos
Unfortunately, around the time the site went live, the country went into lockdown. Not good for any business, but even worse for a cattery reliant on holiday bookings. Bookings dried up, and the cattery was pretty much closed down.
However, rather than cancel any campaign, Nickie and Paul realised that the lockdown wouldn’t last forever and pushed on with optimisation of the site and adding these local towns and villages so that when lockdown was eased and people started thinking about getting away again, their site would be in a good place to start picking up traffic again.
SEO – Marketing & Social
Whitestake, just outside of Preston is close to some larger towns including Chorley, Southport and Wigan. But even around the local area there are several larger villages which the previous site was not ranking for.
I am adding individual pages to pick up these towns and villages across the area and we’ve seen some great results getting the site ranked across a 20 / 30 radius of the business – ideal for people looking for a really high quality cattery.
To supplement the work being done onsite, we also building out blog posts which in turn being pushed to social media, as well as work undertaken on the businesses GMB (Google My Business) account.
The results
It’s fair to say that the business was realistic about what could be done on the budget they were looking to spend. I believe we have surpassed those original expectations, especially with the build of what is a stunning new website and the ranking of the site locally. In the customers’ own words
Owen has given our website an overhaul and also done a lot of SEO work for us. The results have been brilliant with increased traffic leading to more enquiries. We left everything in Owens capable hands and he has delivered exactly what he said he would and more. Wouldn’t hesitate to recommend him.