Who
Your Coach Hire (YCH) was founded in 2018 by two friends with decades of combined experience in the coach travel business. They had an idea (and lots of contacts) and were looking to turn it into a thriving business of their own.
The ProjecT
getting a startup on the road. Then accelerating fast.
In 2018, YourCoachHire was just getting on the road, and they needed a digital partner to help provide the online presence, booking capability and a strategy to be found.
They needed a logo and brand, a site that would enable them to launch and gain a foothold quickly in the coach travel marketplace and a strategy for finding new business from day one. We recommended gearing the site’s design, build and content to being indexed and promoted by search engines like Google as quickly as possible. As a start-up with no immediate presence in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) we also recommended marketing the website through paid advertising on Google Ads.
The website also needed to be central to YourCoachHire’s business, with the company using online management as a convenient way to collaborate from wherever they needed to work. It needed to allow visitors to send a request to the YCH office, asking for a quote for date, number of passengers and journey (pick-up and drop-off). This would then be channelled into the site’s lead system to be processed into a quote and then, if accepted, a booking.
Five years and one global pandemic later …
In 2023, YourCoachHire had successfully weathered the storm of Covid-19, and the many months of people rarely needing coach travel anywhere. They geared back up and asked us to help them with a refresh of the website. Redder worked on the site, inside and out, replacing the underlying architecture and producing a more open, fresh design. The new layout includes a better use of space; new typefaces and text layout; a more interesting combination of text and images; and easier content management.
the result
In both of the iterations of the YCH website, while the design and development team got to work building the site’s appearance and core functions, our marketing team worked on a strategy for promoting the website. We worked with YCH to identify key words and phrases to target (and those to avoid). To get the site moving and indexed as quickly as possible in search engines, we designed the site’s structure and content around making an immediate impression for those keywords. At the same time, we built ad campaigns for promoting YourCoachHire post-launch to drive search traffic to the website’s Quote Request feature. The structure of the site also includes clever ways to tailor content and allow new content to be added and optimised quickly and easily.
The original site launched in the spring of 2018, and hit the road running with the campaigns driving traffic and leads to the management area of the site. As a bespoke site built in the Symfony PHP framework, it is optimised for a quick and easy experience for visitors and a simple system for the YCH staff. The strategy for the structure and content of the site also started to pay dividends with the site being indexed and quickly advancing in the SERPs, saving some of the advertising budget.
YourCoachHire gained ground on competitors, with the website key to finding and managing new business. They are now a serious contender in the business within just a few years of the original launch, moving thousands of people to exciting destinations across the UK and Europe. Redder works with YCH to host and maintain the website. A large part of our work with them now is marketing analysis and looking after the ongoing Search Engine Optimisation. A key part of this is content generation through writing original blog content and keeping the site content fresh. We also manage ad campaigns to help them maintain a competitive advantage.
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