Case Study for Carmel Country Inn - Carmel, California

Carmel Country Inn has been a client of ours for years – dating back to the old Moriah days! And, in that time, we had been unsuccessful at convincing them to have a new site designed. Finally…something or someone convinced the powers that be to explore the possibility of hiring their current marketing company to also DESIGN a site for them! Naturally, we were thrilled. And, working with the primary innkeeper, Amy Johnson, has been a delight.

To ensure the design process would be a phenomenal success, we suggested Amy hire photographer extraordinaire, Dan Cunningham of PXL Creative...Scott’s former right hand man and now a successful entrepreneur in his own right. Dan spent several days photographing the inn and the surrounding Carmel/Monterey area. The majority of his photography was used in the new design. His attention to detail and talent for staging the shots contributed significantly to the overall look and feel of the final product. After all, he used to be our primary web designer!!

Our next challenge was to highlight the main feature of the Inn without turning folks away – Carmel Country Inn is quite literally - a pet hotel! To highlight this strength, we devoted an entire section to the pets of their guests, just as they do at the Inn. The corkboard on the pets’ page is almost an exact replica of the display the Inn proudly presents to their guests. Each pet is as important as their owner at Carmel Country Inn!

Yet, interestingly enough, the way in which we designed the site to highlight the pet friendly aspect did not distract from the upscale aspect of this charming country inn. Thanks to the many talents contributing to this project, the site has been an overnight success story. Amy’s involvement in the design process was instrumental in communicating the overarching marketing message and mission of Carmel Country Inn. Without her professional direction and vigilance, we would not have achieved the quality of the end product. Read the feedback below from Amy Johnson, Innkeeper of Carmel Country Inn:

“The reservation requests are 100% booking - with the option of entering their credit card info ahead of time.  We've all of the sudden become data entry clerks - which is fine - can't complain!  The most amazing thing is the amenities - having them on the rooms’ page and on the reservation request form is "brilliant.” We fill out a form and tape it up on the wall by my desk so I know when we need to order cake, buy cheese......and in just 3.5 short days,  we've sold 12 cakes, 4 cheese/wine trays 3 orders for roses and 4 massages. We're going to have to make a notebook, not just a wall!

I must tell you everyone is loving the site, both guests and staff. You really encouraged me to become a better innkeeper and implement so many of these things I knew we could offer/provide; they just kept getting put at the bottom of the pile of "things to do.”  Your marketing worksheet of questions really helped me evaluate our product and level of service - after 6 years of innkeeping, we were more or less running on auto pilot - I actually discovered I could still be creative and learn new things!

Thanks to you, Darcie, Scott, Dan and everyone else who made this possible!

Our new site has been up 1 week now.  We are up 40% with bookings for the week over this same week last year.  Needless to say, we've already paid for the site and the photography with the increased reservation pace!!!”

For this case study, I would encourage everyone to carefully read the promotions case study below. The case study shows the baseline report on the search engine placement before the launch of the new site and the subsequent skyrocketing result of the search engine placement about one month after the site launched. This data will astound you.

2007 Carmel Country Inn Promotion Case Study:
Here is the data from our company – White Stone Marketing:

Your ranking improvements are off the chart!

I’ve included a ranking report further down the page. However, the proof is in the pudding so I also checked your visitation stats and have included a couple graphs for you.

Here are your statistics reports:

Since your web site went live the end of February, March is the month we’re looking at. We’re a bit premature here as April should be even better but this gives us a good idea of what’s happening.

Generally there is a seasonal increase in visitation to B&B web sites in the spring. However, if you look at the reports below you can see that November and December are nearly identical and January and February are nearly identical. I’m guessing you and Allison did something for January (i.e. signed up for some new sites) which improved your January/February numbers. It’s the jump from February to March which is the most interesting and it’s the blue line we’re interested in (ignore the gold line).

In the first report, we can see an increase of over 5,000 unique visitors for March which equals a 163% increase in traffic over February. Even if we account for seasonal increases we’re still looking at a large increase which is fantastic.

This second report is simply a daily view. It appears it took the search engines about two weeks to index your new site and improve your rankings  which is why we see a jump around March 7th.

Lastly, here are your old and new search engine rankings for Google, Live.com and Yahoo... While these rankings will jump around a bit -- the better the ranking the more stable it should be (i.e. #1 rankings don’t move much).

Anything in Green is a top three result and a sure hit according to search engine heat maps (that’s where people click the majority of the time). Yellow is obviously less clicked on and red even less. However, we shouldn’t knock anything on the first page of a search engine results as that’s always considered.
So as I look at your report it’s mostly green. I even calculated an average column and as you can see, it’s pretty awesome.