15 → 3,000+ daily visitors
7 years (ongoing) engagement
The Challenge
<p>When Cornish Secrets first engaged Jamie McKaye, the site was generating roughly 15 organic visitors per day. The brand had a small portfolio of hand-picked luxury holiday cottages in Cornwall but virtually no search visibility. They were invisible in a market dominated by established aggregators like Sykes, Holidaycottages.co.uk, and cottages.com — brands with six-figure link profiles and decades of domain authority.</p> <p>The brief was straightforward: build sustainable organic visibility that could compete with the big players, without the big-player budget.</p>
The Strategy
The engagement has spanned 7 years and evolved through every major shift in search — from traditional on-page SEO and technical foundations, through the Core Web Vitals era, into today's AI-driven search landscape.
Technical Foundations & Architecture
A full technical audit addressed crawlability, indexation, site speed, and URL architecture. The site was migrated to a performance-first stack (WordPress on GeneratePress, Cloudways hosting, Cloudflare CDN) with a focus on Core Web Vitals. A comprehensive internal linking architecture was built to distribute authority from the homepage through to location pages, collection pages, and individual property listings.
Content Strategy & Topical Authority
A hub-and-spoke content model was deployed. Location hubs (St Ives, Padstow, Bude, Falmouth, etc.) were built as deep, editorially rich destination guides — not thin keyword pages. Each hub connects to collection pages (dog-friendly cottages, sea view cottages, hot tub cottages) and supporting blog content covering local events, dining guides, walks, and seasonal travel advice. The content is written for humans first — then structured for machines.
Schema & Structured Data
Comprehensive JSON-LD schema was implemented across the site, including VacationRental schema for individual properties, LocalBusiness schema, FAQPage schema on collection pages, and BreadcrumbList schema sitewide. This structured data layer gives both traditional search engines and AI models a machine-readable understanding of what Cornish Secrets is, where it operates, and what it offers.
GEO & AI Search Optimisation
As AI-powered search engines emerged, the strategy evolved. Content was restructured to be entity-rich and citation-worthy — designed not just to rank in Google, but to be surfaced and recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews when users ask questions like "best luxury holiday cottages in Cornwall" or "where should I stay in St Ives." This includes llms.txt implementation, entity-first content architecture, and FAQ structures that map directly to conversational AI queries.
The Results
Measurable outcomes that made a real difference.
-
3,000+
Daily Visitors
Up from 15 daily organic visitors
-
7 years
Engagement
Ongoing partnership
-
100+
Content Pages
Location & collection pages built
-
4
Schema Types
VacationRental, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Daily organic visitors | 15 → 3,000+ |
| Engagement duration | 7 years (ongoing) |
| Content pages built | 100+ location & collection pages |
| Schema types deployed | VacationRental, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList |
More work
Other recent projects.
ACCL
2× organic traffic in 12 months
Doubling organic traffic and driving impressions into the millions for a B2B network infrastructure company — through deep technical SEO, AI-first content, and comprehensive structured data.
Spechunter
3× organic traffic + 7.77× ROAS
Tripling organic search traffic and delivering nearly £190K in Google Ads conversion value from £24K spend — for a niche UK building supplies ecommerce brand.
LessonLoop
Full SaaS — live in App Store
A music academy management platform built from scratch with React, Supabase, and Capacitor — with an SEO/GEO-optimised marketing site and 950+ passing E2E tests.