A guide to the Cotswolds for visitors from around the world

The brief

After Banburyshire, the Cotswolds was the obvious next step: a neighbouring region with the same honey-coloured stone and a far bigger audience. The Cotswolds spreads across six counties and almost 800 square miles, and draws visitors from all over the world. Most of them start planning online, a long way from the nearest tourist information centre. We wanted one guide that covered the whole region, not just one county or one town.

What we did

• Built the guide on Meridien, the destination platform we first made for Banburyshire, so places, attractions, accommodation and events all link to each other.
• Designed it for planning a trip: big, honest photography of the region, clear routes from a village to what is nearby, and pages that are easy to read on a phone in a car park.
• Covered the whole region, from market towns and villages to cathedral cities, across Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Bath and North East Somerset.
• Brought together more than 850 places to stay, from hotels and inns to holiday cottages and campsites, alongside places to eat, gardens, castles and stately homes.
• Wrote for the questions visitors actually search for, from dog-friendly days out and steam railways to filming locations and the region’s stranger traditions, such as cheese rolling and woolsack races.
• Made every page easy for Google to understand, so the guide shows up for visitors searching from the UK and abroad.

The result

Cotswolds Info now sees huge amounts of traffic from visitors around the world, most of them finding it through search, and it is our clearest example of what good SEO can do for a destination. It also showed that Meridien could grow from one market town to a region of six counties without starting again.