This is where I tell you the behind-the-scenes story (messes included) of the market launch of one of the most important private jet charter and sales websites.
Case studies usually tell you the numbers.
Take this chart.
- You can see the site traffic shooting up…
- the exact moment it happened…
- a red arrow telling you “hey, this used to be at zero!”
This is typical of case studies, but it means NOTHING.
Why?
Let me tell you right away.
- Is 12,000 users a lot or a little?
- Assuming it is an acceptable number, are we talking about idle visits or quality traffic?
- Is the industry where that result was achieved competitive, or relatively empty?
These are just some of the questions charts like this one cannot answer.
And let’s be honest…
Unless you catch me in front of the TV with my son, I am not inclined to sit through the classic “they all lived happily ever after” that case studies are made of…
That is why I decided to tell you how it really went, messes included.
#fullsteamahead
October 2019, five in the morning.
Milan was damn cold, and the last thing I wanted to do was get off the plane and line up for the shuttle bus that would take me and the other passengers to the terminal.
The marketing director of NGK Sparkplug, a well-established Japanese multinational (well known in the Italian market as a market leader and a sponsor of Ferrari and Ducati), had called me in for a consultation and I could not say no.
Despite the prestige, though, right then I was cursing my job.
After waking up at an ungodly hour, taking a lightning shower, begging the taxi to wait a few minutes and diving into it, I had caught the plane by a whisker.
And now I was coming down the steps of the Alitalia flight trying not to trip over the suitcase of the guy in front of me.
My hair was freezing on my head and, to console myself, I kept telling myself I would soon reach the office.
It took a second.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught some movement to my right, so I turned.
A man in his sixties, distinguished, wearing a tailored coat, was elegantly walking down the steps of his private jet to get into the car waiting for him a few steps ahead.
A vision.
I stared at him the way teenagers stare at Justin Bieber.
“A private jet” I thought, dreamily. “It leaves when you want, you can take your time, no stress. You get on, have a drink and off you go, you are there in no time. Waited on hand and foot, like a star.”
That is what private jets were to me until that day. But a phone call was about to change things…
I got to the office beaten like an egg but, so as not to give the impression I was off my game, I forced myself to look relaxed and at ease.
The consultation began and, as expected, I started to warm up. I talked until lunchtime, almost without stopping, and only then did I allow myself a break. I would use it to rest and recharge for the afternoon session.
I was wrong.
I was about to bite into my sandwich when the phone started ringing.
“Hello?” I said on autopilot, trying to swallow the first bite.
“Hi Roberto, pleased to meet you, I’m Mauro.”
“Pleasure is mine, Mauro” I replied absent-mindedly. “What can I do for you?”
“Listen, I have heard very good things about you and I would like to understand if and how you can help me. I have a big problem to solve and I no longer know which way to turn.”
“Sure, go ahead” I encouraged him, while trying to open a small bottle of water with one hand.
“I am the founder of a company that sells and charters private jets.”
I froze.
Private jets?
I smiled, thinking back to my daydream from a few hours earlier.
I invited him to go on.
“I would like to know whether you can help us get rid of the ads and make our organic traffic take off. Our site currently depends almost entirely on Google Ads, which is costing us an absolute fortune. We need to climb the Google rankings, we need to diversify and start getting clicks we do not pay for.”
Beating the Google Ads addiction and getting booking requests for private jets… and to think I was supposed to be relaxing!
I said goodbye to Mauro, set up a call for the next day and went back to my consultation.
“Yesterday I told you I had heard good things about you” Mauro began.
“I will tell you upfront that I have been through several agencies, I believe all the best known in Italy, and I have to tell you, first of all, that I am no longer willing to experiment.
I want to be clear from this moment that I do not intend to ‘try’: I need to know for certain whether you are the SEO consultant who can get me ranked on Google, where the clicks that matter are taken, and everything else.
I want to know how long it can take, while staying completely out of the technical side which, as you will understand, does not interest me in the slightest.”
Okay, Mauro knew what he wanted.
I told him that, to give him the answers he was looking for, I would first have to carry out a market analysis. I needed it to understand what to do, how to do it and at what price.
He simply replied: “Roger, full steam ahead!”.
I threw myself into the digital market analysis.
It was the first time I had worked for a private jet company, and I was thrilled: I could not wait to start.
After jumping through hoops to postpone a full day of consultations, I got straight to work.
Monitors on, ergonomic chair so I would not end the day bent in two, some of the most powerful software in the world ready to be interrogated.
The situation?
I imagined it was the same as countless other companies. Affiliates, online trading, SEO warfare.
“I am a black belt in hyper-competitive industries” I thought.
And I imagined I would soon be facing yet another wrecked website, with pages to redirect, URLs to fix, badly optimized content and a link profile that would look bad even after bombs fell on the studio.
Once again, I was stunned.
I rarely get a divine vision of this kind. I analyzed the site over and over with the best software (Screaming Frog, Semrush, Website Auditor…) and the more I checked, the less I could believe my eyes.
- Errors? Zero.
- The site? Beautiful.
- Usability? Excellent.
- Design? Super responsive.
The pages were fast, users could navigate perfectly from any device and there was nothing rowing against the project: I was looking at a technically perfect website.
So where was the catch?
What kept fastprivatejet.com stuck there, with organic traffic below zero, watching competitors stroll past and grab thousands of visits every day?
It was the market research that shed light on the mystery.
I interrogated the software as if it were my crystal ball and, after a careful SEO audit and a meticulous competitor analysis, the problem hit me with the force of the wooden clogs my mother used to hurl at me when I was a kid.
The problem was huge.
A huge authority problem.
Fast Private Jet’s competitors were not just doing well, they were thriving!
Sky-high domain authority, an abundance of content, a backlink profile that calling high-quality would be an understatement, internal links organized to perfection.
In short, everything we lacked.
It was disarming.
That was the result achieved by multinationals that had worked for years and years to build their power and their reputation over time.
That was the moment I realized how things really stood: not only would I have to defeat true giants of global private aviation, but to do it I would have to work on a brand-new site with a budget that, however significant, was certainly not comparable to what those powerhouses had spent over the years.
A (nearly) impossible mission.
I consoled myself thinking that, with time on my side, if I executed a perfect, error-free plan I could gain ground. I was strong: with one year of well-tuned work I could recover three, because the competitors had gotten a few things wrong.
I convinced myself.
It would be a slow journey, very slow, but doable.
I put the analysis down in black and white, spelling out every aspect of timing and strategy and, when presentation day came, I laid my plan out for Mauro.
The presentation of the analysis was going smoothly and my client seemed satisfied.
Until…
“We can do this, Mauro. It will take at least a year to bring home the result, but we can do it. One year and we take home all the traffic.”
“A year?” thundered my (now furious) client from Verona.
“Let’s not kid ourselves! We are shelling out absurd amounts for advertising and getting nowhere. We want the booking pages to rank first on Google and take clicks within three months. I already told you budget is not a problem. If you guarantee me those timelines you have the green light, but these are the conditions.”
I broke into a cold sweat.
On one hand I knew this could be one of the most exciting projects ever; on the other I was certain three months would never be enough.
What to do?
Over the years I have earned a certain credibility and, today as back then, credibility is everything to me. On top of that, a project like this would leave no room for the slightest mistake.
I could never make it in three months, the situation was too complex.
And yet I could not pass up such an interesting project…
One question kept booming in my head at full volume: “What on earth do I do?“
I went back to the basics I had absorbed after the umpteenth re-read of Never Split the Difference and tried to negotiate.
I reminded Mauro that a few days earlier we had talked about my data-driven approach (very different from the agencies’) and about the fact that, with SEO, results are certain but not fast.
I proposed a monthly contract and offered him the option to end the collaboration at any time, with no penalties.
I had to sweat quite a bit, but in the end I pulled it off: I had six months.
Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Time was passing.
I was sure the project would go well and bring enormous satisfaction, but I doubted that in six months every target page would reach the top positions in the SERPs.
What would happen if I did not get Fast Private Jet’s pages off the ground by the deadline?
- The contracts of the clients I had turned down to dedicate myself to this project? Gone.
- A client who could walk away with an email and no notice? A disaster.
- My reputation? Torn to pieces.
By then, though, I was in the dance.
I had decided to take this risk and panicking was not an option. It was time to buckle down and dedicate body and soul to FPJ.
I studied the operational plan down to the smallest detail, built dashboards that kept me updated in real time on Google Data Studio and drew up the right strategies for the domain to build authority.
The hours went by as I hammered away at the keyboard.
Between a stream of emails and calls with my collaborators, I put together a demanding editorial plan, detailing it obsessively so that the content production could be flawless.
Then I focused on finding the metrics that could make the difference on links, and scheduled on-site fixes that would guarantee a ‘zero surprises’ approach.
The first four months went by.
There was no denying it: all of us were giving 300%, but our efforts were not paying off.
I was so absorbed that I started doing something I normally avoid like cockroaches: checking daily, from day one, whether the target pages were gaining positions or not, hunting for the smallest positive movement.
Because what counts is not the effort you put in, but the results you bring. And results were in very short supply.
Something perfectly normal was happening, but at that moment it felt like a problem the size of a truck about to run you over: the Google Dance.
Yes, you read that right: the pages were dancing.
Every time the site gained a few positions for the queries chosen during the market research, a few days later everything would inexorably slide back down, making everything damn unstable.
Two months were left before the end of the first semester and the pages still were not climbing enough, plummeting right when they seemed to have gained good positions.
The competition, meanwhile, stayed put, mocking me from the front line of Google’s results pages.
I checked and re-checked, even though I was certain everything had been done correctly.
A few timid rankings were starting to appear, but deep down I knew it was not enough.
And while we watched Google dance, Mauro’s call came.
“Hey Roberto” he said, in a voice that sounded incredibly stern to me.
“Hi Mauro” I replied, ready for the firing squad.
“Allow me to get straight to the point” I closed my eyes. I was braced for the blow.
“Mauro, listen…” I tried to interrupt him.
“It has been four months since we started working together” he went on, as if I had said nothing.
“I see the pages going up and down. I thank you for all the reports you send me, but…”
“Mauro wait, let me…”
“But is this really how it works?”.
That was it, I had failed.
“I never imagined I would get booking requests before the six months were up!”
My eyes went wide and I jumped to my feet.
“The people writing and calling us are genuinely interested, not like with the ads where I have to discard half the requests. Roberto, really well done! I will not deny I can see the light, I am truly confident!”
The gates of heaven swung open for me.
I realized I had been under so much stress that I had ignored the fact that the climbing keywords were already generating quality calls, that a wave of long-tail queries was starting to take hold and, even more importantly, that even while they danced, those keywords were generating excellent leads!
Two years have passed since the launch of the Fast Private Jet site, a company that is now among the most relevant in Italy, and I will not deny that thinking back on this adventure puts a huge smile on my face.
I am truly proud to have taken part in the launch of such an ambitious project, where consistency, determination and planning came together in a clear and profitable way.
Today good old Mauro keeps pushing hard the way only great captains can, and I keep at it to guarantee fastprivatejet.com the coveted organic coverage on all the most ambitious searches in the industry.
Searches we now solidly capture across the whole country.
The preferred choice of prominent entrepreneurs, football clubs and anyone who intends to travel by jet, FPJ is now targeting international markets from its two new offices, one in London and one in New York.
Certainly not an easy challenge, but one I am sure will keep giving all of us excellent room to grow.
And besides, let’s be honest… if it were easy, everyone would do it. Right?
#fullsteamahead
The company’s website: https://www.fastprivatejet.com
FPJ on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fastprivatejet/
