When the new owner of Royal Orchid Thai Spa & Hair Salon approached us for help with her day spa online marketing, we immediately started poking around the existing website. What we found was not surprising. We never slate other people's work, but it has to be said - the SEO was non-existent. The previous owner had the website created by a well-known "online marketing" company and despite the fact that she was paying for SEO services, none of it was evident. The most basic SEO was not even implemented. That makes us angry. That kind of "take the money and run" attitude is what gives the industry a bad name. For example, just googling the brand name "Royal Orchid Thai Spa" returned a page 3 listing. Ugh.

That's all changed now. We bought a new domain name, rebuilt the website from scratch, and instituted new bookings pages. Previously, customers were not even using the online bookings forms provided. We are happy to report that customers are now using the online bookings process - emails are sent to the front desk with all the relevant contact details - and its proved to be quite successful.

Starting with our Comprehensive Online Competitor Analysis - we were able to quickly identify all the competitors in and around Royal Orchid Thai Spa's catchment area: 20 were identified - 4 were identified as serious competition. We did some digging, identified the keywords we needed to target, and set about building pages that would get us serious online traffic.

Here's our results in just 3 short months:

Next we identified "cornerstone" ideas that needed long-form copy (1500 to 3000 word articles) that needed to be written as blog posts that would establish the Spa as experts - such as their Rasul Mud Treatments and new Fish Pedicures among many other services. The result is spectacular - for example - from a random booking as a result of therapist "upselling" - the Rasul chamber is now one of the most popular services requested via online bookings. Yes, SEO can be profitable. You just need to know where to look - and having a client who is willing to pay for SEO doesn't hurt either.

Next we created an online store to sell Gift Vouchers. Sales are steadily going up month on month. Customers are starting to love the process of purchasing online.

The next project was to re-introduce the revamped spa and services to customers who have not been to the spa for a long time (it must be said that the new owner did have to spend quite a bit to breathe new life back into the interiors and introduce new services) - we achieved that by creating email marketing campaigns. Open rates for the emails are above industry standards. These stats are tracked by our service providers using their own databases.

We inherited a facebook page that wasn't well considered - or marketed. In 3 short months, the facebook page follower rate has grown from 3 thousand odd to over 5000. We spend quite a bit on facebook ads, and are experimenting with Twitter ads. No, online marketing is not cheap, but the results are well worth it.