Workshop pre-read · Aug 26–27, 2026 · conversion & lead-gen
Conversion & Lead-Gen Plays
The SEO and conversion ideas we've been collecting, turned into a shortlist of plays and checked against what the search data actually shows works for PerryGolf. This is a Day 2 quick-wins agenda — and a Day 1 guardrail: when the walkthrough drifts into design or conversion ideas, they live here, so we can note them and keep moving.
Executive summary
- The Open pages take 2,793 visits to produce one enquiry; a Custom Tours page takes 24. That 116x gap is a conversion problem: the traffic and the onward offers are already there, and still almost nobody enquires.
- The new platform lets us build targeted pages quickly, so programmatic becomes a strength when it is aimed at winnable gaps — “golf cruises in Spain”, where 168 paid sessions now land on a generic page — and each page carries real depth.
- Lead-gen offers should trade in access and expertise: a sample itinerary, a specialist who has played the course, an alert when 2027 dates open. Fire them off real engagement signals — pages viewed, dwell, scroll — so the timing matches the visitor.
- It all rests on one Phase 1 decision: where captured leads go (capture, PGGO, follow-up). The enquiry backend is currently unwired; settle that before the Phase 2 pop-ups and personalization.
Why it matters for the workshop — it is the Day 2 quick-wins and conversion discussion — and the place to park design and lead-gen ideas so the Day 1 walkthrough stays on track.
Start here
The leads are already on the site
- The Open pages take 2,793 organic visits to produce one enquiry. A Custom Tours page takes 24. Same site, same brand, a 116x gap. The fix is in conversion.
- The high-value traffic is already arriving, and these pages already offer onward trips and a contact CTA. They still barely convert, because the pages that rank pull reference visitors who aren’t ready to book.
- The new platform lets us build pages quickly and still give them real depth, so we no longer trade scale against quality. The question becomes which pages to build, and for which demand.
Same site, same brand. The Open needs 2,793 visits per enquiry; Custom Tours needs 24 — a 116x gap. A long bar is an inefficient section.
Every figure on this page traces back to the Search Performance pre-read, so the two never disagree. The figures and URLs describe the current live site — the legacy PHP perrygolf.com, whose source is the PerryGolf/sos-perrygolf.com repo (2024Redesign branch). The new build in apps/web is the future state these plays shape.
Baselined against the data
SEO / AEO plays
Each play carries a verdict tied to what the search data shows — what to pursue, what is marginal, and what to leave alone.
| Play | What the data says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Get cited in AI answers (AEO / GEO) | “golf cruises” already ranks 2.1 and is quoted in Google’s AI Overview. We hold the signals AI leans on: Authorized Provider of Old Course tee times, Official Sub Agent of The Open, 40 years in the category. But the site emits only Organization and FAQ structured data, with no product, trip, or breadcrumb schema. | Pursue |
| Win the winnable commercial terms | “best irish golf tour operators” ranks 6.4 on 2,261 impressions and gets 0 clicks; “south africa golf” ranks 7.9 on 810 impressions, also 0 clicks. Both rank fine already; the title and snippet are losing the click. “scotland golf packages” sits at 12.1 and “golf tours ireland” at 20.5, on keyword difficulty of 5 and 8. “best scotland golf tour companies” already ranks 4.2 at 5.31% click-through, so the pages rank when they’re right. | Pursue |
| Convert the audience we already own (The Open) | future-venues.php alone pulls 18,755 clicks at position 6.6 and produced 2 enquiries in 90 days; past-winners pulled 9,560 clicks and produced 0. The section is 76% of all organic traffic at roughly 30 seconds on page. The trip links already on these pages barely convert, so the move is a lower-commitment offer that matches reference intent — a guide or a date alert. | Pursue |
| Treat depth and dwell as the real lever | Every page converting above 1.4% holds visitors past 58 seconds; the near-zero converters hold them around 30. The cruise hub (1m52s, 26% bounce) and its departure pages (~60% bounce, under a minute) are the same section with opposite results. | Pursue |
| Programmatic pages, done right | The platform can build targeted product × destination pages quickly. Aimed at the gaps below and given real depth, they earn their place. Detail in the next section. | Pursue |
| Keyword-universe tooling (Claude Code + data APIs) | A useful internal way to find and track terms. This is ops tooling for the team, and the weekly Cassidy workflow already covers the AEO/SEO feedback. | Selective |
| Close the brand + destination gap | “perry golf” ranks 1.0 at 37% click-through with nobody bidding against it, but “perry golf ireland” sits at 9.1 and “perry golf scotland” at 4.9 — the only brand terms off page one. A cheap tidy-up. | Selective |
| Off-site SERP plays (e.g. Facebook Groups) | Off-brand for premium travel and a distraction from the on-site wins the data points to. Note it and move on. | Skip |
The one we most want to build
Programmatic pages, done right
The existing cruise-departure and venue pages show the risk: thin pages bounce (55–71%) and half never get indexed. The play here is template-driven product × destination pages, spun up quickly on the new platform and aimed only at intersections where demand exists but no dedicated page does yet. New pages plug into the related-tour and related-cruise cards the new build already has, so they join the existing network.
| Pattern | Example URLs | Why it’s winnable | The depth bar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Golf cruises in {country} | e.g. /golf-cruises/spain, /golf-cruises/italy | Cruises are our best commercial ranking (2.1) and already AI-Overview cited. 168 paid sessions currently land on a generic Spain page (position 15.7) with no cruise page to receive them. | Real itinerary, ports, courses and dates on every page. |
| {destination} golf packages | scotland / ireland / england golf packages | “scotland golf packages” 12.1, “ireland golf packages” 18.3, “golf tours ireland” 20.5 — all on difficulty 0–8. “best scotland golf tour companies” at 4.2 shows the ceiling. | Courses, a sample itinerary, pricing cues and a clear enquiry path. |
| {event} travel packages | St Andrews 2027, Ryder Cup 2027 | “british open 2027” ranks 5.0; “the open 2027 packages” already converts at 8.49% click-through (position 2.7). St Andrews 2027 is the strongest association we have. | Genuine package detail with a clear booking path. |
| Signature experiences | Old Course tee times, golf + safari | /customtouring/old-course-tee-times converts at 3.90%, the best on the site, yet ranks 9th for “st andrews old course tee times” (480 searches a month, difficulty 2). | Credential and access content that answers the buyer’s question. |
Each new page becomes an input to the weekly Cassidy AEO/SEO feedback loop — build, measure, iterate — without standing up new monitoring.
Where the leads already are
Lead-gen mechanics
Two rules keep a prompt from being an annoyance: match the offer to the intent stage of the page, and match the moment to the visitor's activity level — the more engaged the session, the more a prompt is earned; leave low-activity, brand and returning-converted visitors alone.
| Page / intent | Mechanic | Trigger | Offer | Where the lead goes | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Open reference pages — future-venues.php: 18,755 clicks, 2 enquiries | Better-matched soft capture (current cruise links underconvert) | In-content / scroll | Guide to attending The Open, including by ship | Email list (ESP) | P1 inline · P2 capture |
| Trip Finder cruise filter — 581 sessions, 1m51s, 0 enquiries | “Email / save these results” | On demand (button) | The results, by email | ESP + PGGO | P1 / P2 |
| /calendar.php — 2m07s dwell, 18% bounce, 1 enquiry | “Notify me when 2027 dates open” | Inline + time | Date alert | ESP alert list | P2 |
| Cruise hub — 2,748 sessions, 1m52s, 22 enquiries | Specialist-consult CTA | Persistent | Talk to someone who has sailed it | PGGO enquiry | P1 |
| Destinations + Custom Tours (PYOT) — Scotland converts 2.63%; ~250 enquiries/qtr, near-zero organic | Consult + enquiry incentive | Persistent | Sample itinerary (from the 31 custom-tour examples) | PGGO | P1 |
| Abandoned enquiry / configuration (any) | Save + resume (the “abandon cart” analog) | Exit-intent / on-return | Emailed resume link + follow-up | PGGO (needs identity capture) | P2 |
| Any high-dwell page | Engagement-triggered box, interstitial-compliant | Activity threshold, frequency-capped | Guide or consult | ESP / PGGO | P2 |
Trigger taxonomy to agree on
Time on pageScroll depthExit-intent (desktop)Activity / engagement scoreAbandonmentOn return
Before any of this ships
Guardrails
- Don’t let the pop-up cost you the ranking: Google treats intrusive interstitials as a mobile ranking signal — an aggressive gate on the reference pages that rank could cost the very rankings it captures from. Any box must be interstitial-compliant: delayed, and never full-screen on mobile.
- Don’t interrupt what already works: Brand traffic converts fine and no competitor is bidding on it. Suppress prompts for brand-landing, already-converted and returning enquirers; frequency-cap, and keep everything dismissible.
- Settle the pipe first: Every capture needs a destination — capture → PGGO/ESP → follow-up — plus the session and identity needed for abandonment recovery and activity scoring. The design pre-read already flags the enquiry backend as “not wired.” That is the Phase 1 foundation.
Sequencing
Phase 1 foundation vs Phase 2
Phase 1 — foundation now
- Sharpen the onward offers already on the high-traffic pages
- Specialist-consult CTAs — the enquiry incentive, reframed as access not discount
- The capture pipe: enquiry / newsletter → PGGO / ESP → follow-up
- Fix the /custom/ 301-to-login
- Nav-dropdown merchandising to surface the pages that sell
- Tighten breadcrumbs and emit BreadcrumbList schema, plus the wider AEO schema gaps
- First programmatic pages on winnable product × destination gaps
Phase 2 — once the foundation holds
- The timed / scroll box — interstitial-compliant and activity-triggered
- Date alerts (“notify me when 2027 opens”)
- Soft content offers — The Open guide, sample itineraries
- Abandoned enquiry / configuration recovery
- Repeat-visitor homepage personalization (needs the Phase 1 data capture)
How we’ll know it’s working
Success metrics
North-star
Organic enquiries, and the visits it takes to earn one. Everything below is a leading indicator, and all of it reads on the weekly Cassidy loop and GA4/GSC — no new tooling.
| Metric | Where it stands today | Target / direction | Tracked on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic enquiries (north-star) | 503 a quarter, 0.74% | More enquiries, higher rate | GA4 · weekly Cassidy |
| Visits per enquiry, target sections | The Open 2,793; Destinations 55 | Drive down through better conversion and depth | GA4 · GSC |
| Winnable commercial terms | “scotland golf packages” 12.1; zero-click at 6.4 and 7.9 | Onto page one; click-through above zero | GSC weekly |
| Micro-conversions (new) | none captured today | Baseline saved searches, guide and date-alert signups | ESP · PGGO |
| Dwell and bounce, target pages | converters hold past 58s; leaks ~30s at ~60% bounce | Lift dwell, cut bounce | GA4 |
| AI citations (AEO) | cited for “golf cruises” | Extend to Old Course, destinations, The Open packages | Cassidy · spot checks |
| New programmatic pages | n/a | Enquiries per page, and the share clearing the dwell bar — not page count | GA4 · GSC |
Guardrail metric: no ranking or bounce regression on the reference pages where a prompt fires — they rank 1–3 for their own terms today, and that is worth protecting.
Workshop pre-read for Aug 26–27. Pairs with the positioning framework, the search performance data and the design direction. Back to the workshop agenda.