Woods 2 Waves
Five months from nothing: how SiteJacket built Woods 2 Waves a website and the search presence to fill it
Woods 2 Waves opened in a quiet valley outside Perranporth with three units, a domain name, and no online presence at all. No website, no Google listing, no reviews, and a direct competitor four miles away sitting on more than a hundred of them.
A seasonal business has one shot a year. Miss the summer and you wait twelve months for another.
SiteJacket built the site and ran the search campaign alongside it.
Trades Pro
Service
5
Core pages built
4 Weeks
Brief to launch
3
Units to fill
Project Overview
What We Were Working With
What the client needed
- A website for a business that did not yet exist online
- Direct bookings, rather than paying commission to booking platforms
- To be findable for people searching for glamping in Perranporth and Cornwall
- To be visible before the summer season, not during it
What we delivered
- WordPress website design and build (Trades Pro)
- Design built on the BeTheme framework, in natural tones drawn from the valley setting
- Full copywriting from scratch, no existing content to migrate
- Booking system with Stripe payments, taking direct bookings from day one
- SEO-ready technical setup (Rank Math, Google Search Console, schema)
- TrustIndex Google Reviews integration
- Google Business Profile created, verified and optimised
- Six-month Local SEO retainer running alongside and after the build
The Challenge
Starting from zero; a race against the clock
Tristan Sandbrook came to SiteJacket with a glamping site in Bolingey, a hamlet outside Perranporth, and almost nothing to market it with. Two shepherd huts and a safari tent, a valley with deer and rabbits in it, the Saints Trail running past the gate and the Trans Euro Trail passing the entrance. All of it genuinely good, and none of it visible to anyone searching.
There was no previous website to improve on. No Google listing. No reviews. The business name itself was still undecided when we first met, with Tristan weighing up Woods To Waves against Woods 2 Waves. He settled on Woods 2 Waves during the build, which meant everything from the domain to the Google listing could be built once, consistently, rather than corrected later.
Two things made this harder than a standard launch.
The competition was established. Wrinklers Wood, the nearest comparable site, had over a hundred Google reviews and years of history behind it. In local search, review count and age both count for a great deal. A brand new profile with zero reviews starts a long way behind.
And the clock was real. Glamping in Cornwall is close to a five-month business. Search demand peaks in July and falls by roughly 85% by mid-September. A site that launches in August has missed the year.
The Core Problem
A genuinely good site in a genuinely good location, that nobody searching for it could find.
Our Approach
What We Did
1 Design and Build
Four weeks from brief to launch, three of them building and one for review, testing and gathering the rest of the content. The site runs on WordPress with the BeTheme framework.
The visual direction came from the place rather than from a template. Natural greens, browns and blues, photography of the valley and the huts, and a tone that matches what the site actually is: quiet, small and a bit off the beaten track. Glamping sits between camping and a hotel, and the site needed to look like neither.
2 Direct Bookings from Day One
Tristan was clear from the start that he wanted people booking through the website rather than through a platform taking a cut of every stay. The site launched with a booking system and Stripe payments built in, so every unit could be booked and paid for directly.
That decision shapes everything the SEO campaign does afterwards. Every booking that comes through search is a booking that keeps its full value.
The five core pages at launch, each with a job, were instrumental to having a website optimised for search engines:
Home
What the place is, where it is, and how to book.
ACCOMMODATION
The three units, with photography, detail and direct booking.
ACTIVITIES
Surfing, mountain biking, skateboarding, the Trans Euro Trail and yoga. The differentiator, and later the source of the site's first organic rankings.
BLOG
Built at launch, used properly from month three onward.
Contact
Address, enquiry form, and the practical details guests ask about.
Once these pages were built, we laid out a plan to Tristan regarding individual pages for each of the units, along with individual activity pages for maximum visibility in local searches.
3 Search Foundations Before Launch
Page titles, meta descriptions, clean URLs, schema markup and a Google Search Console connection all went in before the site went live. The Google Business Profile was created, verified and built out properly rather than left as a pin on a map, because for an accommodation business the profile does as much work as the website.
TrustIndex was connected so that reviews landing on the Google profile would appear on the site automatically.
4 Then the SEO Campaign, for Five Months
The build was the start rather than the finish. The Local SEO retainer ran from launch, and the site grew with it:
- Individual pages for each unit. The Nest and The View as shepherd huts, Chirps as the family safari tent, each written to be genuinely different from the others rather than three versions of the same page.
- A dedicated Glamping in Perranporth page, to catch people searching for the area rather than the business by name.
- An activities and surfing page, written for people choosing where to stay rather than where to take a lesson, which is a distinction that mattered because one of our other clients is a surf school in the same town.
- Blog content, aimed at the searches that happen around a stay: the walk into Perranporth along the Saints Trail, what to do when it rains, the wildlife in the valley.
- Listings and citations, from a standing start: Google, Bing, TripAdvisor, and the directories that feed the rest.
- Reviews, chased properly and replied to individually, every single one.
The Results
What Changed
Search visibility went up 3.4 times. Google showed the site 180 times a month in the weeks after launch. By September it was 617. Average position across every tracked search term improved by seven and a half places, and the site now appears in Google's local map results for a quarter of them.
Search became the main way people find the site. At launch, organic search brought in an eighth of all website traffic, with most of the rest coming from the launch buzz on social media. By September that had flipped: search was over 40% of all visits, and those visitors stayed roughly twice as long as anyone arriving from anywhere else.
Reviews more than doubled, at a perfect rating. Six to thirteen, all five stars, in a period where the established competitor down the road gained one. Every review has a reply.
The business is now properly listed. The citation score went from 5 out of 100 at the start to 45. TripAdvisor is claimed and live. Direction requests on the Google profile went from 4 a month to 51.
And something nobody was tracking at the start: AI assistants. Two visits in June, eighteen in September, now over 9% of traffic. That channel did not exist for this business five months ago.
The honest part: clicks from Google have not yet grown in proportion to the visibility. Three times as many people see the site as did in June, and turning more of them into visitors is the work that follows. That is a fixable problem, and a much better one to have than not being found at all.
3.4 x
Google search visibility in five months
40%
of site traffic now from organic search, up from 12%
Related Services
What Made This Possible
Trades Pro Website
A complete five-page website with the technical groundwork for search built in from the start. Designed, written and launched in four weeks.
Local SEO Retainer
The campaign that ran alongside and after the build. Google Business Profile, citations, content, reviews and monthly reporting.
Hosting & Care
Hosting, backups and updates, so the site keeps working while the business gets on with the season.
Opening Something New? Be Findable Before You Open
If you have a new business that requires an online presence, get in touch with SiteJacket today