Industry: Aviation (regional airline)
Services provided: WordPress rescue, hosting and performance optimisation (from October 2023); Holistic SEO retainer, 15 tracked keywords (from 22 October 2024)
Period reported here: November 2024 – July 2025
Background & Objectives
Fly ALS, a regional airline in Kenya, needed more than SEO — they needed a complete digital rescue. Their website was slow, underperforming, and losing visibility to dominant competitors like AirKenya and SafariLink.
Their goal: build long-term search authority, increase organic bookings, and strengthen their presence across key domestic routes — all without relying on expensive PPC and social media campaigns.
The Challenges
Fly ALS’s challenges were layered: poor hosting made their website sluggish and vulnerable, while their on-site SEO and content were outdated. Competitors dominated the digital space for vital keywords like “Flights to Diani“, “Domestic Flights Kenya“, and “Flights to Masai Mara“. Their sales funnel lacked targeted content that could attract, engage, and convert at each customer journey stage.
Our Strategy – The SMART Framework in Action
We began with an in-depth SEO audit to diagnose the site’s technical, content, and keyword gaps — laying the foundation for a precise roadmap. (If you’re wondering where your site stands, get a free SEO audit here.)
S – Speed & Security: We moved the website off a low-grade hosting provider onto our high-performance servers, implemented advanced caching, optimised code and images, and integrated Cloudflare CDN.
M – Market Alignment: Through a workshop with Fly ALS’s team we mapped their core customer segments, clarified pain points, and identified peak-season opportunities — focusing on Diani from October to January, then shifting in February to target Masai Mara ahead of the July–October safari season.
A – Authority Building: We rewrote key site content with optimised keywords, meta descriptions and headers, improved internal linking, and built foundational directory placements and backlinks. Destination pages were created for Lewa, Loisaba, Samburu, Nanyuki, Migori, Tsavo and Amboseli during February and March 2025.
R – Rankings & Relevance: We tracked 15 high-value route keywords including “cheap flights in Kenya”, “domestic flights in Kenya” and “flights to Masai Mara”.
T – Tracking & Transparency: Monthly reports tracked Search Console impressions and clicks, Google Analytics sessions by channel, and the position of every tracked keyword, month by month.
Content Marketing & Schema
To support the funnel at every stage we produced blog articles and destination content that broadened reach and built authority in Kenya’s domestic aviation sector. These articles targeted real customer questions rather than keywords alone, in line with Google’s E-E-A-T principles. We also implemented schema markup — including FAQ, Breadcrumb and Article schema — to make the site’s structure explicit to search engines and, increasingly, to AI retrieval systems.
One instructive moment came when Fly ALS wanted to pivot focus back to Diani two days before Easter for a short sales push. SEO is not built for knee-jerk reactions; it is a strategic discipline that rewards foresight. The February pivot to Masai Mara was the illustration — the high season would not arrive until July, but the groundwork had to be laid months ahead for the rankings to be in place when demand peaked.
What We Measured
Every figure below is an absolute measurement, taken from a named tool over a stated period. No percentage-uplift claims are made, and no figure is estimated or modelled.
Keyword positions — all 15 tracked keywords reached Google’s top 10
Source: “Keyword Positions” sheet, Fly ALS monthly SEO report, February 2025 edition. Columns are the measurement dates recorded in that report.
| Keyword | Initial | 29 Nov 2024 | 30 Dec 2024 | 30 Jan 2025 | 28 Feb 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cheap flights in kenya | 50 | 42 | 26 | 5 | 5 |
| domestic flights in kenya | 11 | 8 | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| local flights in kenya | 12 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| cheap flights to diani | 10 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| flights to diani | 10 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| cheap flights to diani beach | 12 | 7 | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| flights to vipingo | 8 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| nairobi to vipingo flights | 9 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| flights to kilifi | 8 | 4 | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| flights to amboseli | 10 | 8 | 7 | 5 | 5 |
| amboseli flights | 17 | 15 | 13 | 5 | 5 |
| nairobi to amboseli flights | 15 | 12 | 7 | 6 | 5 |
| flights to masai mara | 14 | 13 | 13 | 3 | 3 |
| nairobi to masai mara flight | 15 | 12 | 8 | 2 | 2 |
| flights from nairobi to masai mara | 12 | 8 | 8 | 2 | 2 |
Fifteen keywords tracked. Fifteen inside Google’s top 10 by 28 February 2025, from starting positions between 8 and 50. Two of them — “flights to Vipingo” and “Nairobi to Vipingo flights” — reached position 1.
Search visibility
Source: “GSC Traffic” sheet, Fly ALS monthly SEO reports, month-end figures from Google Search Console for flyals.com.
| Month end | Impressions | Clicks |
|---|---|---|
| 30 November 2024 | 34,232 | 2,894 |
| 31 January 2025 | 40,092 | 2,790 |
| 31 March 2025 | 37,504 | 2,023 |
| 31 May 2025 | 45,158 | 2,059 |
| 30 July 2025 | 58,034 | 2,795 |
Paid search spend: zero
Source: “Analytics Traffic” sheet, Fly ALS monthly SEO reports, Google Analytics 4 sessions by default channel group.
Paid Search sessions recorded zero in every month from January 2025 to July 2025. All search visibility described above was earned, not bought.
Results & Impact
By the end of the reported period Fly ALS held top-10 positions for every tracked route keyword, including position 1 for two Vipingo terms and positions 2 and 3 for the Masai Mara routes that the February strategy had been built around. Search Console impressions grew from 34,232 in November 2024 to 58,034 by the end of July 2025, with no paid search spend at any point.
Two honest caveats belong in any reading of these numbers. First, Fly ALS’s bookings ran through a third-party reservation system that sat outside our analytics, so we can report search visibility and rankings but make no claim about booking volume or revenue. Second, the impression growth from May to July 2025 coincides with the Masai Mara high season the airline sells into, so seasonality is a genuine contributing factor alongside the SEO work.
What the Client Said
“Certainly, thank you for the detailed update on the performance of our website. We truly appreciate the outstanding results from your SEO efforts, particularly the notable improvement in keyword rankings.”
— Lilian Owino, Revenue Analyst, ALS Limited, 10 March 2025
Earlier in the engagement, on 27 November 2023, Commercial Officer Gurtej Singh Dhanjal wrote following the hosting migration and performance work: “The site is loading much faster which is a great start.”
Methodology
All figures on this page are absolute measurements drawn from the monthly SEO reports produced during the engagement, sourced from Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 for flyals.com, with each measurement date stated. We publish no percentage-uplift claims, no modelled or projected figures, and no metric we did not directly measure. Where a business outcome sat outside our instrumentation — as booking volume did — we say so rather than estimate it.
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Mehul Shah is the Founder and Managing Director of SEO Smart Limited, a specialised SEO, GEO and AEO agency based in Kenya. With nearly 20 years of experience, Mehul helps agencies and businesses build scalable SEO strategies, performance-optimised websites, and conversion-driven content marketing frameworks.