Case Study
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Visit Newcastle
How Firewire Delivered 64% Organic Traffic Growth for Visit Newcastle
Visit Newcastle is the official destination marketing organisation for Newcastle, responsible for promoting the city’s tourism, events, experiences and visitor economy. Their website is a key platform for showcasing Newcastle’s iconic culture, food scene, coastal adventures and local operators to travellers planning their stay.
Industry: Tourism & Destination Marketing
Location: Newcastle, NSW
Services Provided: SEO, Content Strategy, Technical SEO
OUR CHALLENGE
Visit Newcastle approached Firewire Digital with a clear goal: to strengthen their organic search visibility and ensure that travellers seeking Newcastle experiences could easily find authoritative, accurate, and inspiring informational guides.
Despite strong brand recognition, their website faced significant SEO challenges that were holding back performance:
- Technical SEO issues: Canonical errors, pagination problems and structural inconsistencies
- Large volume of legacy 404s: Impacting user experience and crawl efficiency
- Misaligned on-page optimisation: Pages weren’t mapped to real search behaviour or high-intent keywords
- Lack of structured content strategy: Content opportunities weren’t being systematically identified or prioritised
- Complex internal workflows: Multiple stakeholders involved in publishing, requiring clear guidance and frameworks
The opportunity was to create a strong technical foundation, align content with user intent, and ensure Visit Newcastle’s website reflected how visitors actually search for experiences.
The Results
Growth Summary
Firewire began by fixing all major technical SEO blockers that were limiting visibility. We resolved canonical and pagination issues, improved internal linking, addressed structural inconsistencies and removed or redirected a large volume of legacy 404 errors.
Once the technical foundation was rebuilt, we developed a comprehensive content mapping system based on real-world search behaviour. This enabled us to identify the highest-value travel, experience and destination queries — and align existing pages to those opportunities.
We then worked closely with the internal Visit Newcastle team to optimise priority pages, update outdated content, and guide the creation of new content that better matched search intent.
The impact was clear:
- Organic traffic increased by 64%, driven by foundational SEO improvements and targeted content optimisation
- Top-3 Google rankings increased by 76%, improving visibility for high-value travel and destination-specific queries
- Significant crawl efficiency improvements, following the cleanup of hundreds of legacy errors
- Clearer content strategy adopted internally, enabling more effective ongoing publishing
Outcome
Through a combination of technical SEO improvements, on-page optimisation and a structured content plan, Firewire has strengthened Visit Newcastle’s digital presence and improved how both locals and travellers discover the region online.
Visit Newcastle now benefits from a cleaner, more search-aligned website that ranks stronger for destination-led queries and continues to grow month-on-month. The improvements have laid a long-term foundation for sustainable visibility — ensuring the region’s experiences are easier than ever for visitors to find.
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