Explore a user-friendly platform featuring the best of Arizona

Client: Arizona Office of Tourism
Location: Arizona, USA
Industry: Destination Marketing

Visit Site

When the Arizona Office of Tourism (AOT) partnered with Tempest to reimagine its website design, in addition to a fresh look and feel, AOT also wanted to build a content-first publishing platform to showcase authentic experiences and stories from across the state.

The existing VisitArizona.com was limited by a static, template-driven design. The AOT marketing team was looking for a more robust content management system that would allow them to cross-promote content, adjust images, and fine-tune layouts and messaging quickly and easily. The AOT marketing team also required a streamlined website navigation that would make it easy for visitors to explore inspiring content while providing a healthy foundation for ongoing content development.

A Data-Driven Content Audit  

Throughout the creative brief and discovery process, Tempest's marketing team conducted a full content audit, analyzing historical data about how visitors engaged with the website's content and layering in helpful competitive search data.

For example, the content audit revealed that AOT's "Local Word" blog drove a significant portion of the website's organic search traffic. Yet, the blog was nested beneath the Plan" section of the site and challenging to discover.

The Tempest team also found that important content for Arizona's many cities, parks, and attractions were organized by regional designations such as "North Central" or "Southeast." While those naming conventions may resonate with Arizona locals and internal AOT staff, visitors searching online or browsing the website would benefit from more specific and user-friendly naming conventions and pathways.

Streamlined Information Architecture

Armed with data and insights, the Tempest team proposed a brand new information architecture that would streamline redundant content and elevate high-performing content. The new VisitArizona.com information architecture focuses on five options: Experiences, Events, Places, Travel Like A Local (blog), and Plan Your Trip. Whether researching and gathering inspiration for a trip, or already in-market and looking for suggestions, this streamlined approach makes it easy for travelers to navigate based on their travel planning stage.

Tempest elevated the highly popular blog content in the main website navigation and shifted to a user-focused naming convention of "Travel Like A Local." In the refreshed "Places" section of the website, the regional designations were replaced by search-friendly terms like Cities, Parks, Dark Skies, and Deserts.

A Smooth SEO Transition 

To improve VisitArizona.com's search engine performance, the Tempest marketing team conducted a full SEO transition of the site, including granular redirect mapping, content migration, meta data migration, image optimization, link equity, and more. With the content strategy, information architecture, and SEO transition combined, Tempest was able to not only maintain the website's SEO performance, we were able to drive a significant lift in post-launch performance:

• Sessions increased 38%
• Organic sessions increased 64% 
•  Pageviews increased 16%
•  Organic sessions to blog content increased 297%

Empowered by a robust publishing platform and healthy information architecture, The AOT marketing team continues to provide a rich editorial experience across every page of the site, inspiring travel to beautiful Arizona.