BACKGROUND

Merlin Entertainments is a prominent player in the global attraction landscape, renowned for its extensive portfolio of theme parks, aquariums, and interactive experiences that captivate millions of visitors worldwide. As the operator of iconic attractions such as Legoland Discovery Centers, SEA LIFE Aquariums, and Madame Tussauds, Merlin Entertainments is committed to delivering exceptional family entertainment experiences.

In an increasingly competitive digital environment, maintaining visibility and appeal to a broad audience across numerous markets is essential for attracting and retaining visitors. Faced with this challenge, Merlin Entertainments reached out to us at The Egg to leverage our expertise in digital marketing and enhance their online presence across key markets.

Challenges + Goals

Merlin Entertainments approached us with the following goals:

• Enhance Brand Visibility and Audience Engagement: Increase the organic search visibility of their attractions across multiple markets, ensuring stronger brand presence and improved engagement metrics.
• Increase Organic Rankings: Achieve higher rankings for target keywords, positioning them competitively against both direct and indirect competitors in the digital space.
• Leverage Data for Strategic Insights: Develop data-driven strategies despite limited existing data, focusing on optimizing current content and identifying new content opportunities.
• Capture Post-Pandemic Tourism Surge: Effectively attract and engage with the wave of global travelers returning to leisure activities, bolstering visitor numbers to their attractions.

strategy + execution

To improve traffic, we began by familiarizing ourselves with the industry, focusing on understanding current traffic dynamics. We conducted comprehensive keyword research in the travel sector, which provided valuable insights into keywords with the potential to compete with those currently dominating travel searches.

Insights:

• Publishers (entities that produce and distribute content, particularly in the travel, leisure, or lifestyle sectors, including lifestyle magazines) and online travel agency (OTA) websites performing very well for target non-brand keywords
• Among various content types, blog articles stood out for ranking highly on these keywords, often featuring vivid imagery that enhanced their appeal.

Armed with this information, we moved on to conduct a content audit to assess our online standing against the competition. This assessment laid the groundwork for developing a robust content strategy, including content ideation, creation, and on-page optimization—all aimed at boosting traffic.

Next, we evaluated the sitewide content of the 7 Merlin attractions against our travel industry keyword research, identifying key content gaps on their websites. A key insight from the content audit was that most of the Merlin attractions had low to no organic visibility for non-brand target keywords.

This led us to outline three essential courses of action:

• Optimize underperforming content to boost its search rankings.
• Identify reusable content pieces for editing and further optimization.
• Develop new content to fill significant gaps and enhance overall site value.

We created 54 new pieces of content for the client, across 7 attractions in 5 different languages.