Park Trek Walking Holidays

Context

Park Trek Walking Holidays is a 25-year-old multi-day guided walking tour operator running trips across Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, NSW and the Northern Territory. Owner Charles Thompson, who bought the business around four years ago, engaged Wolf IQ after a discovery call revealed Park Trek's organic traffic — roughly 500 visitors a month — was a fraction of two direct competitors', at roughly 5,000 and 8,000 visits a month.

Charles wanted a website that reflected the quality of Park Trek's product and converted more visitors into bookings, without losing the SEO equity already built into existing pages. The scope covered a homepage refresh, a technical SEO audit and clean-up, and an ongoing Essentials Website Care Plan.

The challenge:

• The WordPress site, last substantially rebuilt around 2014–2015, carried legacy structure that undercut Park Trek's premium, "serene" brand positioning.
• Generic, non-keyword-rich page titles and unoptimised meta descriptions were suppressing rankings for high-intent, non-branded searches such as "hiking tours Tasmania."
• Limited off-page SEO and no visibility in AI-generated answer engines — Park Trek's own site was blocking GPTBot when it shouldn't have been.

Solution

• Homepage & technical SEO clean-up: corrected meta titles and descriptions, cleared every 404 error, set up 301 redirects, tidied the schema and heading hierarchy, and lifted desktop PageSpeed to 99 (mobile improving toward the high-70s, up from an initial 63).
• Scaled the SEO engagement with results: moved from an initial "lite" scope to a standardised, six-month-minimum retainer once technical wins and ways of working were demonstrated.
• AI/AEO visibility: built FAQ content and schema across walking-tour pages specifically to target AI-generated answer engines, at Charles's request after he raised concerns the site wasn't visible to platforms like ChatGPT.
• Cornerstone content: published pieces such as The Ultimate Guide to Pack-Free Walking Holidays in Australia to build topical authority for key non-branded search terms.
• Data-driven prioritisation: used Google Search Console data to identify and prioritise the three highest-opportunity pages — Homepage, Tasmania, Tarkine — for further on-page optimisation, then tiered the remaining pages in order of priority.

Results

Page 1 keywords up 92%, organic sessions up 164% a month.

• Page 1 keyword rankings up 92% since the January 2026 baseline.
• Organic sessions up 164% a month; organic clicks up 26% trailing three months year-on-year; average keyword position halved, from 30 to 15.
• Desktop PageSpeed at 99/100, up from a base of 54 at kickoff; zero 404 errors sitewide. Mobile PageSpeed is improving toward the high-70s.
• "Park trek walking holidays" holds position 1 with a 37% share of the site's traffic; "park trek tasmania" also ranks position 1.
• Engaged sessions up around 18%, average engagement time up around 39%; mobile now drives up to 71% of engaged sessions.

Park Trek is now on an ongoing Website Care Plan and SEO Growth Plan, with monthly reporting against organic sessions, ranking keywords, Page 1 keywords and Authority Score, and further SEO growth work and UX optimisation underway.