Digital Marketing Review Of The River Cruise Industry
April 01, 2015
I thought I’d conduct a digital marketing review of the river cruise industry. I’m most familiar with Viking River Cruises from their PBS sponsorship of Downton Abbey. And it seems from my review of digital marketing for the chosen competitors, Viking River Cruises appears to dominate traffic, value, social media and link ranking in the industry. But the question is why, was it the TV sponsorship of a hit show? Or are other factors at work, namely content marketing?
I chose the following companies to review in the industry:
River Cruise Competitors
AmaWaterways - http://www.amawaterways.com/
Avalon - http://www.avalonwaterways.com/
Grand Circle Travel - http://www.gct.com/
Tauck - http://www.tauck.com/
Uniworld - http://uniworld.com/
Vantage Travel – http://www.vantagetravel.com
Viking River Cruises - http://www.vikingrivercruises.com/
I used SEMRush.com to estimate the number of organic keywords for each of the competitors. Chart 1 indicates the number of keywords where each of the competitors achieved a ranking in a search engine, plus the estimated traffic from organic rankings, and the cost of that traffic if PPC advertising were conducted.
Company |
Keywords |
Traffic |
Traffic Cost |
Viking River Cruises |
2.9k |
121700 |
$579k |
Tauck |
3.9k |
45800 |
$216k |
Grand Circle Travel |
1.8k |
27200 |
$48k |
Avalon Waterways |
1.5k |
23400 |
$152k |
Uniworld |
1.4k |
22800 |
$131.6k |
AmaWaterways |
590 |
12100 |
$57.8k |
Vantage Travel |
283 |
7100 |
$19.9k |
Chart 1 – Keywords, Traffic & Traffic Value (SEMRush.com)
To me what’s interesting about this traffic and ranking chart is to review the numbers in relation to other SEO ranking factors. For example, chart 2 below shows the competitor’s ranking and link factors from Ahrefs.com, including overall domain rank, number of backlinks and the number of referring domains. There isn’t a complete alignment between Ahrefs domain ranking and the position of the competitors in estimated keywords, traffic and value. AmaWaterways has a domain ranking of 60, but is 2nd on the keyword ranking chart. If however, we review chart 3, the number of pages indexed in Google chart, a clearer picture emerges, AmaWaterways is bottom of the list of competitors in terms of the number of pages indexed in Google. More pages, more chances to rank; less pages, fewer chances to rank. Ahrefs ranking is a reflection of external links rather than some Google derived number, charts 1 and 3 indicate Google factors.
Company |
URL Rank |
Ahrefs Domain Rank |
Backlinks |
Referring Domains |
Viking River Cruises |
73 |
63 |
149582 |
2507 |
AmaWaterways |
55 |
60 |
41961 |
1861 |
Tauck |
53 |
59 |
37000 |
1400 |
Uniworld |
43 |
59 |
25000 |
509 |
Avalon Waterways |
49 |
57 |
12000 |
999 |
Grand Circle Travel |
19 |
56 |
19000 |
1200 |
Vantage Travel |
42 |
52 |
4203 |
498 |
Chart 2 – Linking Factors, Domain rank, Backlinks, & Referring Links (Ahrefs.com)
In chart 3, there’s list of competitors with their number of pages indexed in Google using the site:www.domain.com feature. What’s surprising about chart 3 is that Viking River Cruises has so few pages indexed in Google given the top rankings for domain rank in Ahrefs and more importantly in keyword traffic and value rankings in SEMrush.
Company |
Site:domain |
Avalon Waterways |
38800 |
Grand Circle Travel |
29200 |
Tauck |
25700 |
Uniworld |
5300 |
Vantage Travel |
4190 |
Viking River Cruises |
3220 |
AmaWaterways |
1460 |
Chart 3 – Pages indexed in Google
Viking River Cruises has some work cut out for them in getting more pages ranked in Google. A higher number of pages indexed don’t necessarily indicate the company in question is targeting more keywords. For Tauck, chart 1 indicates they have more keywords ranked than any other company, but Viking River Cruises beats out the competition on traffic from organic and the value of the keywords, the relationship between traffic and value, and domain rank makes sense. I was also thinking despite this, that Viking river cruises should review their number of pages indexed in comparison with their actual number of pages. If there’s a large disparity, there may be some problems with getting indexed into Google for the company, which should be fixed.
I decided to go back and conduct a screaming frog index of Viking’s site, and the site has 12404 pages, 8694 pages are blocked by the robots.txt file, and 3117 pages are available, only 1739 pages are html pages, so it appears the site is fully indexed in Google.
If I had more time, I’d do more work on comparing keywords amongst each of the competitors, this screenshot below from spyfu.com, indicates there’s not much overlap in keywords between Tauck and Viking River Cruises. With my SEO hat on, I think Viking may have a lot more opportunities to grab rankings by building more pages and targeting more keywords. Although Tauck’s keywords maybe targeting other customers.
User experience is increasingly a ranking factor for websites for Google, the announcement by Google that on 4/21/15 mobile design for websites will significantly influence overall ranking factors cannot be ignored. So it was interesting to run GTMetrix reports for each of the competitors to find overall site speed, Viking River Cruises came out on top. Though all of the companies have more work to do on improving their sites, calling in the system administrator or developer to look at code and servers can only help. The report that Viking River Cruises does well on site speed is interesting in relationship to ranking factors.
Company |
Page Speed Grade |
YSlow Grade |
Page Load Time |
Total Page Size |
Total # of Requests |
Viking River Cruises |
B |
D |
3.98s |
8.83MB |
166 |
AmaWaterways |
B |
D |
4.17s |
1.70MB |
113 |
Vantage www2. |
C |
D |
5.63s |
2.55MB |
68 |
Grand Circle Travel |
A |
D |
5.73s |
1.95MB |
124 |
Uniworld |
C |
D |
6.10s |
2.27MB |
78 |
Tauck |
A |
D |
7.08s |
1.99MB |
151 |
Vantage Travel |
B |
D |
7.71s |
3.95MB |
163 |
Avalon Waterways |
C |
D |
7.79s |
8.90MB |
163 |
Chart 4 – Site Speed & Grade, Page load time. (GTMetrix.com)
Viking River Cruises dominates the social media metrics for this industry. Viking is particularly strong on YouTube and Google+ with over 1.5 million followers on Google+ that puts Viking on par with many extremely large national brands in the Fortune 500, and this is certainly one of the factors that contribute to overall domain ranking in ahrefs.
Company |
|
|
YouTube Views |
YouTube Subcribers |
Pinterest Followers |
Google+ |
|
AmaWaterways |
63946 |
11804 |
10902 |
64 |
3628 |
141 |
|
Avalon Waterways |
145774 |
2589 |
121414 |
209 |
223 |
4 |
|
Grand Circle Travel |
18946 |
574 |
7333 |
153 |
2904 |
328 |
|
Tauck |
20325 |
3584 |
830233 |
362 |
495 |
258 |
|
Uniworld |
161634 |
12577 |
125568 |
515 |
809 |
517 |
|
Vantage Travel |
83416 |
1828 |
167657 |
223 |
1237 |
1471 |
|
Viking River Cruises |
469650 |
19937 |
6812093 |
3230 |
2959 |
1703169 |
2360 |
Chart 5 – Social Media Metrics
Viking River Cruises and Content Marketing
I was able to find quite a lot of information on Viking River Cruises’ content and social media marketing efforts. Their CMO, Richard Marnell has conducted quite a few interviews and explains Viking’s strategy, content marketing is certainly important, but in one intriguing report Marnell reports that he still considers TV to be an important avenue to reach his audience. I’m only speculating here, but I wonder if the sponsorship of Downton Abbey gave Viking the platform they needed to get traction with their content, SEO, linking and social media?
Content Marketing interview with Viking’s CMO plus
CMO.com interview with Viking’s CMO, from 2010, however, the discussion about customer service in social media was particularly interesting.
And from the CMO Club’s report “Not all customers have made the transition to digital, so the move to digital is not always the best choice. Richard Marnell leads marketing for Viking Cruises, and their clientele is more of the traditional TV-watching 55+ year old variety. When he thinks about the best mix of media for his business, TV still resonates strongly. When he is in-market on TV and aligns his media with what he knows about his audience, sales growth is inevitable. While he still believes digital will grow, for now TV is the route to win over the most likely buyers of his cruises. Notably, Viking’s success was driven by underwriting Downton Abbey on PBS, not just running ads across a wide array of networks.”
Digital Marketing Conclusions
Viking River Cruises comes out on top, in traffic, value, and link building and ranking, and appears to be doing great with getting indexed in Google, I do wonder if there’s more room for Viking to extend its dominance by reviewing gaps between the keywords on its pages and other competitors. I did see some other SEO factors:
- 37% of pages titles were over 65 characters
- 35% of meta descriptions were duplicate
- 62% of images are missing ALT Text
- 86% of H1 tags were duplicate to page titles (talk about the old tactics not going away!)
Given some of these numbers especially the last one on H1 tags, I wonder if the linking factors give Viking’s site such authority that it helps the site to hit above its weight in SEO.
My screenshot below of gct.com in kombat with tauck.com spyfu.com indicates there are more similarities between the these two companies than Viking River Cruises with 1727 shared keywords, compared to 852 for Viking and Tauck. Luck, or a well-placed ad in TV land may still have a big impact on marketing efforts today. That doesn’t mean we stay with traditional entirely, but as Viking demonstrates they leverage their traditional for digital impact.