Car rental in the Balearics: how we multiplied organic traffic (real case)
Indexed keywords
+900% (500+)
Keywords in Top 3
300+
Online bookings
+350%
—— The case, in full
A car rental business in a Balearic town called us with a problem that left no room for interpretation: organic traffic had been falling for months, and bookings with it. It wasn’t a bad month. It was a slope.
The challenge
The sector is one of the most contested in Spain. A local business competes against the big comparison platforms, which have brand budget and a site built to capture exactly that search.
A decline that had been running for months
When traffic falls steadily, the question isn’t how to grow: it’s what is being lost. The audit found a site ranking fewer than fifty keywords for an entire catalogue of services, slow on the phone — where most of the sector’s searches come from — and with barely any links holding up its authority against the competition.
The plan, in phases
Stop the fall first, grow afterwards. It is an order that sounds obvious and is almost never respected: people start publishing new content on a site that is still losing, and the new content inherits the problem.
The restructure started from a simple idea: someone looking to rent a car on an island isn’t searching for «car rental». They search for their area, their dates and their conditions. Every service and every area got its own page, with what it takes to book without picking up the phone.
Where it ended up
From fewer than fifty ranking keywords to more than five hundred, with over three hundred in the Top 3. But the number that paid for the project is the 350% more bookings made through the site itself.
Why it worked
Because we didn’t try to compete where we couldn’t. Against an international platform on the generic search there is nothing a local business’s budget can do. On the specific search — the area, the model, the particular condition — the local business knows more and can prove it. That is where it was won.
The detail worth taking from this case is the diagnosis at the start: telling a slope from a bad month. Everything else followed from that distinction, and plenty of businesses get it wrong.
One weak month is noise, especially in a seasonal sector. A decline that runs for months is a trend with a cause. The two call for opposite reactions: patience in the first case, investigation in the second. Treating a slope as noise means waiting while visibility drains away; treating noise as a slope means changing things that were working.
If you suspect your own site is on a slope, there are a few ways to check before spending anything:
- Compare year on year, not month on month. Seasonal businesses always look worse after the peak. The same month last year is the fair comparison.
- Look at the number of search terms you appear for, not only visits. A shrinking footprint is a sign the site is losing ground even if a few big pages hold up.
- Check the mobile experience yourself. Open the site on a phone, on mobile data, and try to book. What frustrates you will frustrate your customers.
- Search the way your customer does. Try your area, your dates and your conditions, and see who answers.
If the picture is a steady fall, the order matters: stop the loss first, then grow. New content published onto a site that is still leaking tends to inherit the leak.
And be realistic about the comparison with large platforms. A local business isn't going to win the generic search, and the case shows it didn't need to. The room is in specific searches that the platforms answer poorly, because that is where local knowledge shows.
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Updated on 7 November 2026