Louisiana Bed and Breakfast Association

“As you probably know, the membership voted 2 years ago to alternate years to spend our association marketing budget on the directory & the website. This year was the website's turn! And have we made improvements! Some of you may remember Scott Crumpton, the CEO of White Stone Marketing, from our conference in Covington last year. He had lots of great website marketing ideas for everyone and even critiqued our websites. LBBA hired him to do SEO (search engine optimization) for our site and what an incredible job he did!! A lot of the things that he did were behind the scenes, but check out the new appearance for the face of LBBA at www.louisianabandb.com. These improvements should begin to drive all sorts of traffic to our website within the next month once the search engines begin to pick up on the new coding. Thanks to all who sent photography in for the site. Special thanks goes out to Scott for all of the hard, creative and wonderful work that he has done for our association!! I also want to thank Patrick Ashton for all of his work and technical input to help Scott get the job done by our deadline. Without his role as liaison, things would have never been completed so quickly.”

Bonnie Rabe, Innkeeper at the Grand Victorian
New Orleans, Louisiana

In June of 2005, the Louisiana Bed and Breakfast Association (LBBA) contacted us. The administrators of the association indicated that their site performed very poorly in the search engines and lacked professional appeal. White Stone Marketing was retained to completely redesign the web site to increase the professional appeal of the site and to vastly improve the search engine optimization (SEO) rankings in Google, MSN and Yahoo among other search engines.

As we began analyzing the existing web site, we found the site had been designed without regard for the search engines. The necessary SEO text was absent from the site and the search engines could not even go beyond the first page of the site, as there were no internal links. Thankfully, the association gave us carte blanche to completely modify the entire framework of the site.

We started the project with our standard marketing research to discover which keyword phrases potential guests were searching on. This gave us the foundation for our SEO work. However, this project involved hundreds of keyword combinations due to the number of regions and cities represented. We also tested the current placement of www.LouisianaBandB.com for each of these keyword phrases in Google, MSN and Yahoo to achieve a baseline report for improvement. The final stage of our marketing research was to determine beneficial links (for link popularity and increasing traffic) the association could obtain at both the national and local levels. When completed, our report revealed a site that had very poor placement in the search engines, few pages listed in the search engines and even fewer relevant and important links back to the site. Our finished report provided both the association and White Stone Marketing with a roadmap for improving each of these critical elements.

Once our report was finished, we began the process of transforming the LBBA web site into a top performing Bed and Breakfast Association web site. As the official web site of the Louisiana Bed and Breakfast Association, the site needed to properly present both the uniqueness and beauty of the great state of Louisiana and her Bed and Breakfast Inns. Due to restructuring of the entire framework of the web site, we've taken what once contained only a handful of web pages available to the search engines and now provide hundreds of pages with targeted keywords for each region, city and individual inn. The Louisiana Bed and Breakfast Association will realize the following benefits from this investment:

• A 100-fold increase in the number of pages found in the search engines.
• Higher search engine rankings especially at the city level where potential guests search.
• Increased traffic to each member web site which translates into increased revenue for each member inn.
• Increased membership due to the value this new web site brings.

We sincerely thank the administrators of the LBBA for giving us the opportunity to vastly improve their internet marketing presence.