Portrush
About us & Visit Portrush
About Us
Where It Started
Visit Portrush started life in mid-2008 when a website designer Matt Blain bought the domain names Visitportrush.co.uk and VisitPortrush.com and built a simple website to help promote the town of Portrush, which, despite being a major tourist destination for nearly 200 years had very little in the way of promotion or anything to help potential visitors.
From 2009 to 2012 the site didn’t change much, with the exception of minor edits to pages and some additional hotels being added and removed. In 2012, with the arrival of the Irish Open to Portrush, the site underwent some minor changes to take into account the newfound golfing fame.
Between 2012 and 2018 the site pretty much was abandoned, nothing is added to it or being done. It was around spring 2018 that while doing keyword and competitor research for a client we came across Visit Portrush and saw the opportunity to develop it. So we approached Matt and bought the site off of him.
Once we had brought it into the Content Kings stable and started to figure out how we could best use the site. Instead of going down our usual route of setting the site up to make money for us, we decided, as we live in the area, to develop the site for the businesses in the area. To do this we set the site up so that local businesses could claim their listing under various categories such as accommodation, taxis, restaurants and more.
This was exceptionally successful, although required a lot of work on our part. However, due to the success in helping local businesses rather than have then go through large multinationals who take large commissions, we kept this running and redeveloped the site.
Upon taking over the site we were shocked to see that the site was only getting around 30 hits per month and most were for direct from the social media (twitter). So we set about writing some amazing content based on the previous keyword research carried out. Since then we have had some amazing increases in traffic and impressions. With peak months of over 47,000 visitors with an average since we took over the site sitting at just under 8k pageviews per month.