Skagway

About

Voyij is an Alaskan travel platform that offers two features: tour-booking and e-commerce. It is based in the 1,000-person cruise destination of Skagway, Alaska. I was brought in to help Voyij build a content strategy and appear higher on the Google Search Results Page for different search terms.

Goals

Learn how to perform SEO
Build a content strategy
See how I liked working in the travel industry
See how I liked living in a small town in Alaska

Project: Perform a detailed SEO report for Voyij

What is SEO?

SEO is what makes your website one of the first links to appear when you Google something. It is often considered a form of free, albeit competitive, marketing.

For example, a company that sells leather yoyos would want a page in their website to be the first page to appear for the search term “leather yoyos” and related search terms. There are many, many factors that go into how much Google likes your website.

Factors of good SEO

Some websites list hundreds of SEO factors in order of priority. Most experts agree that the most influential factors include how close the title of the webpage matches the search term, how often the search term appears on the page, and the quality of the page's content. However, because Google's algorithm is proprietary, no one knows for certain how Google ranks its search.

The report

To help Voyij rank higher in search, I conducted an SEO audit. That basically means I identified what things Voyij is doing that is good for its SEO and offer specific recommendations for what things it could be doing better. The following visuals are slides from a comprehensive audit I completed for Voyij.

Voyij's strengths

many gorgeous visuals help the site rank and improve user experience.

I crawled a representative sample of pages on the Voyij website to see how the site performed on a technical level.

Where Voyij could improve

Voyij's "title tags," or the phrases that appear in blue/purple on search result pages, were too long and therefore cut off by Google. This severeley impacted Voyij's search visibility.

Voyij was missing major and easily implemented opportunities for having pages rank higher.

I discovered that Voyij had many duplicate product pages. For example, selecting an orocal gold ring in size 6 would load a different page than one in size 6 ½. The rings also featured different karat selections. This caused the SEO weight of one high-ranking product to be divided amongst 30 or so pages offering the same product in different styles.

Content Strategy

One of the most beneficial things you can do to boost your SEO is to publish a continuous stream of content using keywords that are well-suited to the service you offer. I did this by researching keywords with high search volume and low competition. These were the keywords that Voyij could be competitive for. Once I had refined my list, my co-interns and I mapped out a content strategy wherein I would research, write, and publish content once a week.

I researched and compiled a list of 6,073 keywords that Voyij could rank for using Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.

I led a brainstrom with colleagues based on my list of keywords to brainstorm headlines for future SEO-friendly blog posts under the content bucket of "activities."

This article was one entry in my overarching content strategy. It utilizes the long-tail keyword “how to fillet a salmon,” which has 2,000 monthly searches on Google and is a low-competition keyword. The keyword appears prominently in the text. In addition, I got to engage in some very hands-on and very Alaskan research to write it (with edits from my boss).

Outcome

Prepared an SEO Client Report for Voyij
Finished Coursera specialization in SEO through UC Davis
Gained proficiency with Google Analytics and Google Ads
Published seven SEO-optimized blogs over the course of seven weeks
Disapointingly, I was unable to follow through on the analtyics side of the content strategy due the timing of my internship's ending and because SEO takes a while to be registered by the Google search engine

Coworkers

from left to right: me, Taylor, Olivia (boss), and April.

LinkedIn Rec (co-worker)

Coursera certificate

Reflection

Search is a fascinating topic— Google is essentially trying to build models of relevancy and trust for an unspeakably vast sea of content. The experience piqued in me an interest in data science and analytics. It also gave me a firsthand look at the massive influence Google has on advertising and added a lot of nuance to the antitrust stories I had written for Broadband Breakfast.

Living at a bed and breakfast on Skagway’s Main Street was charming, but it was hard to get a feel for the cruise-dependent town due to the pandemic. Similarly, it was difficult to get a sense of the travel industry because no one was booking tours. The people I did meet in town were eccentric and wonderful, and I made great use of the hiking trails nearby.

While I enjoyed working on the data and strategy in my work at Voyij, I found myself missing the culture of collaboration at Ignite and the freedom over my work that I enjoyed at Breakfast. Furthermore, I felt like the skills I had learned in each of these internships could be deepened. These reflections led to my current pursuit of attending a graduate school in human-centered design.