SEO Melbourne worked with the City of Port Phillip council to increase exposure for their Explore Port Phillip site, which provides entertainment and local area information. Council websites face unique challenges — they often have strong domain authority but lack the SEO-optimised content needed to rank for tourism and entertainment searches. This campaign was managed by SEO Melbourne, Melbourne's specialist SEO agency.
The site needed to compete against commercial tourism operators and travel review platforms for local experience searches.
A council tourism site competes with commercial tourism operators and travel review platforms for the same searches: what to do this weekend, where to eat near the beach, what is on in summer. Explore Port Phillip is the City of Port Phillip council's site for local experiences, and its audience is both visitors planning a trip and residents planning a weekend.
The searches those two audiences make are long-tail and varied, which is a strength for a site with a broad range of local offerings, provided the content is organised so that search engines and visitors can navigate it.
The site was buried in search results and engagement with the community through organic search was limited. Content siloing and structure were weak: information about activities, locations and interests sat in a flat arrangement that made it hard for search engines to understand the breadth of what the site covered, and hard for a visitor to move from one experience to the next.
Against commercial operators with focused sites and review platforms with enormous authority, structure was the lever a council site could actually pull.
Council tourism site buried in search results
Top rankings for local entertainment searches
Limited organic engagement with community
3.2× organic traffic growth
Weak content siloing and structure
Themed blog articles and content silos driving traffic
On-page optimisation went across the whole site first: tailored titles, optimised meta tags and a structured heading hierarchy for every key page. We then built themed content silos organising information by activity type, location and interest, so that the breadth of local offerings became a navigable structure rather than a list.
A blog content strategy filled the silos with themed articles on local experiences, seasonal events and area guides, capturing the long-tail searches that tourists and locals use when they plan an activity rather than only the head terms.
On-Page Optimisation
Implemented comprehensive on-page SEO throughout the site — tailored titles, optimised meta tags, and structured heading hierarchy for every key page.
Content Silos
Built themed content silos organising information by activity type, location, and interest — making it easier for both users and search engines to navigate the breadth of local offerings.
Blog Content Strategy
Created themed blog articles highlighting local experiences, seasonal events, and area guides — capturing the long-tail searches tourists and locals use when planning activities.
The focused on-page optimisation and content silo strategy drove organic traffic up 3.2×, with overall website traffic doubling. The themed content approach successfully captured the diverse range of local experience searches.
Key entertainment and activity terms reached top-5 positions, connecting the community with local experiences through organic search.
Organic traffic grew 3.2× and overall website traffic doubled. Key entertainment and activity terms reached top-5 positions, and the Digital Manager's account was of genuine visibility for the council's local entertainment offerings and significantly increased community engagement with the site.
Organic growing faster than total traffic is the signature of a content-structure campaign: the gains came from search, and search rewarded the site for being organised around how people actually look for things to do.
For a council, destination or tourism body, the Explore Port Phillip campaign shows that the breadth of a local offering is only an asset once it is structured into silos and written up as the specific searches people make. Organisation is the strategy.
The next step for a site like this is to keep the seasonal and event calendar publishing ahead of demand each year, so that the silos built for evergreen searches also capture the peaks.