Enquiries up 102%. On a site the team runs.
A travel college with a website over a decade old and templates nobody could change. Now its own marketing team edits it.
- Client
- Project lead
Trav WhiteFounder and Head of AI Engineering
- Industry
- Travel training and education
- Platform
- HubSpot CMS
- Scope
- Sitemap, rebuild, SEO boot camps
- Award
- 2022 Impact Awards
01 The briefRebuild the site so a prospective student can find the course and career pathway they want and enquire, on HubSpot CMS templates the Academy's own team is comfortable editing.
Paying for traffic that did not stay.
Flight Centre Travel Academy trains people for careers in travel and tourism, through a diploma and the employment pathways that follow it.
Its website was over ten years old. General Manager Cameron Boyd knew it did not explain what the Academy offers, or how it differs from other educators and employers in the travel industry. Paid search brought plenty of people to the site, but most of them left without enquiring, so conversion was low and ad spend was going to waste.
The underlying problem was that the team could not change the site. Rigid page templates made it impossible for the Academy's own marketing team to get in and update content, so every fix waited on someone else. A redesign alone would have left the same problem in place a few years on.
Three things working against it
- An old site. Not redesigned in over a decade, and not reflecting the brand.
- Visits that did not convert. Abandoned sessions from paid campaigns.
- Locked templates. The marketing team could not add a page or change a line.
Built together, then handed over.
A collaborative build with the Academy's in-house marketing team. They wrote the copy and sourced the photos and video; we planned the site, built it and trained them to run it.
Scoping, Two workshops
Goals for the site and for each page, the journeys a student takes through it, the content each page needs, and the approach to copywriting.
A plan covering timelines and requirements
A new sitemap, In Miro
The diploma pathways put at the centre, so the course options sit up front, with student experience and career success stories given their own place.
Pathways to the diploma, centre stage
Wireframes, Selected pages
Layouts for key pages that could be duplicated for related content, designed so a prospective student becomes a qualified lead as early as possible.
Three contact points on the pages
SEO boot camps, Two sessions
The Academy wanted to own its content and search, so we trained the team on content creation and on-page SEO and worked closely with them on the writing.
The team writes for search itself
Build and populate, In HubSpot CMS
Every page built from the approved wireframes, with the Academy's copy, photos and video, and our guidance on selected pages.
Templates the team can edit
QA, launch and training, After go live
Content and performance checked on desktop, tablet and mobile, DNS transfer support at launch, then CMS training and post-launch support.
The marketing team owns the website
Three ways to become a lead
Download a brochure
The lightest step, for someone still comparing options.
Enquire about a course
A question for the Academy's team, the step the results measure.
Submit an application
For the student who is ready to start.
More ways in, on every page. The strategy work found the new site needed to be easier to navigate, give visitors more information, and offer more chances to convert on each page.
The diploma pathways, centre stage.
Three frames from the build, in order: the sitemap, a wireframe, and the site at launch in December 2022.
A website the team is excited to update.
Paid traffic that never enquires?
How the four goals turned out.
What Flight Centre Travel Academy asked for before the build started, and where it stood once it was live.
Goal 01
More visitors enquiring and applying
We designed three contact points into the pages, with enquiry buttons in the header and the hero.
102%
more enquiries after the new site launched. The site's conversion rate went from 2% to 3% within six weeks of launch.
Goal 02
Leads who understand the offer
We built a sitemap around the diploma pathways, and pages that explain the courses and careers.
Informed
applicants who already know the courses. The enrolment team noticed it in their conversations: applicants now arrive with a good understanding of the courses and career pathways on offer.
Goal 03
A CMS the staff want to use
We built easy templates on HubSpot CMS, then gave CMS training at launch and post-launch support.
In-house
the marketing team owns the website. With templates they find easy and a working knowledge of SEO, the team is qualified to update content and add pages, and is excited to do it.
Goal 04
More organic search traffic
We ran two SEO boot camps, and worked with the team on informative content written to bring in organic traffic.
9,000+
sessions a week after launch, from fewer than 3,000 a week before it. That is a weekly count, taken either side of launch. Measured month on month, sessions rose 22%, and they were still climbing when this case study was written.
The new site brings in more people, and more of them enquire. Enquiries rose 102%, and the people enquiring arrive knowing what the Academy offers.
The site is also the Academy's to run. Its marketing team updates it and writes its own search content, so a change no longer waits on someone else.
“The website work by Neighbourhood for Flight Centre Travel Academy has been an amazing partnership experience from start to finish. Highlights included sticking to all timeframes, flexibility in approach, SEO and SEM advice and a fun team to work with. Enquiry results from the new website have also seen an immediate spike.”
Cameron Boyd
General Manager, Flight Centre Travel Academy
Who ran it
Trav WhiteFounder and Head of AI Engineering
Led the scoping workshops, the sitemap, the wireframes and the SEO boot camps, through to launch.
HubSpot Certified Trainer, Multi HubSpot Impact Award winner, Founded Neighbourhood in 2015
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