SUNS Hospitality Brand First SEO & Web Design

Services: SEO, Web Design

APAC Search Awards 2025 Finalist
GC SUNS Website Design

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Increase In New Business Members

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Increase In Organic Traffic

About SUNS Hospitality

The Gold Coast SUNS is a professional sporting organisation in the AFL. The Gold Coast SUNS Hospitality team is in charge of the club’s corporate sales & hospitality ticketing on game days. The SUNS are still young on their AFL journey with aspirations to aim towards having a business & corporate network like that of some older AFL clubs we were able to help them bring their goals to life with a brand new online presence.

Client Goals & Challenges

The SUNS Hospitality website was previously run by the commercial sales team through Salesforce. This led to limitations with the overall design, lack of brand consistency & a poor organic presence which did not align with the brand’s image so much so that their team couldn’t find the site on Google without the direct URL.

The SUNS Hospitality team wanted to focus on expanding their business & corporate support across both their game day ticketing & their networking group SUNS In Business.

The SUNS had 2 key target markets they wanted to focus on:

  • Business owners, professionals & entrepreneurs who are looking for quality events to help expand their business networks.
  • Anyone who would like to experience the AFL game day experience differently with a range of Hospitality areas suited for all levels of fans.

The SUNS wanted to ensure their hospitality ticketing wasn’t just aimed at corporates & was accessible to anyone.

    SEARCH RESULT BEFORE

    SUNS SERP result BEFORE

    SEARCH RESULT AFTER REBUILD

    Chairmans Club SERP AFTER

    WEBSITE BEFORE

    GC SUNS Hospitality Website BEFORE

    WEBSITE AFTER

    SUNS Hospitality Web Design

    Our Innovative Brand First SEO Strategy

    Our strategy for the SUNS was not just your typical SEO campaign. The focus here was to ensure a consistent brand experience across the website, SERPs & anywhere that The SUNS Hospitality team are seen.

    Our campaign started with rebuilding the website on a subdomain of their main AFL website to ensure the authority & brand identity of the SUNS was consistent across their sites. The website was rebuilt using WordPress from their old Sales Force site which had a random Mysite domain. The key strategy when rebuilding was to ensure their new site is found for all their branded keywords & hospitality areas, but also focusing on expanding their business program through a range of non-branded keywords.

    After the Rebuild was complete we wanted to ensure we could help increase their overall ticket sales which led us to implement the ability for the team to sell tickets to the Chairman’s club directly from the website as opposed to users having to call the team or enquire by contact form for ticketing.

    When building out the site, we added a unique page for each Hospitality area which displayed all the information users would need to make game day seamless.

    The big focus of this campaign was user experience, both from an end-user perspective and a SUNS management perspective. With everything in the site templated so that as the Season progressed the team could easily make adjustments to their core facility pages.

    One other thing we implemented for the SUNS hospitality team was the inclusion of their SUNS in Business network directory which has allowed them to grow the program by offering this as a bonus to the already affordable SIB membership, that participating businesses would be featured on the SUNS site.

    Our Strategy & Direction

    Campaign Results

    The Results

    This Campaign is a prime example of how SEO isn’t just about being in Google but shows the importance of ensuring when you do show in SERP results that your brand image needs to be consistent & trustworthy to provide the best value to the end user.

    Over the last AFL Season the SUNS Hospitality saw:

    • a 37% increase in SUNS In Business Members (From 75 to 95 Businesses)
    • The SUNS Hospitality site now has a consistent brand image across its Website & SERPs with the site ranking for all their core hospitality areas, & key branded terms.

    • The Site is Ranking for a range of Non-branded keywords surrounding like “Business networking events Gold Coast” & “Corporate Packages Gold Coast”.

    The approach we took to this campaign to ensure we got a good blend of brand & non-branded results was a key factor in the success of the SUN’s growth over the past year.

    NON-BRANDED RESULTS

    SUNS Non-Branded Results
    DS Level Up

    With Digital Surfer

    At Digital Surfer, we don’t just bring you more enquiries. We ensure those leads are the right kind to help you level up your business.

    If you’re ready to transform your business and reach your goals, it’s time we had a chat. Our digital marketing team will customise a campaign to help you increase your incoming business and how much each lead is costing you. Leave your details and we’ll get back to you soon, or give us a call.