The opportunity
Being well known is not the same as being found.
Ekka is a Queensland icon. But being well known does not guarantee being found at the exact moment a family is deciding whether to go, which tickets to buy, what it will cost or how to get there.
Those questions were already being asked. The opportunity was to make Ekka the best answer.
In four months we helped the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (RNA) remove years of technical friction and launch an SEO Sandwiches content program that gave Google and AI platforms far more useful Ekka information to surface. The result was the strongest organic visibility recorded for the website in a decade.
The results
A four-month campaign, measured.
Click and impression figures are from Google Search Console. Estimated visits and AI Overview appearances are reported as estimates. Keyword footprint is organic keywords tracked by Ahrefs. The 70% figure applies to clicks from showbag-related searches, not all website clicks.
The challenge
Years of digital friction between interest and action.
Ekka had no shortage of awareness. The problem was what happened between someone becoming interested and finding the information they needed to act.
The website carried years of digital friction, including outdated URLs, broken links, 404 errors, incomplete redirects, sitemap issues, oversized images and inconsistent server response times. Valuable seasonal pages were also commonly taken down after the event, risking the authority and visibility they had earned.
Meanwhile, families were searching for practical answers:
- How much does it cost to go to Ekka?
- Which days are the quietest?
- Does Ekka have fireworks every night?
- What is the best way to get there?
- Is Ekka a Queensland public holiday?
- Which showbags should we look for?
If Ekka did not provide the clearest answer, another website would. The campaign had a short runway of four months, so every task and every piece of content needed a clear job.
The strategy
Remove the roadblocks, then answer the questions people already ask.
1. Remove the roadblocks first
Before asking Google to send more people to the website, we made it easier for search engines and visitors to move through it:
- Fixing more than 50 redirects within Umbraco.
- Preparing 127 additional redirects for implementation through Cloudflare.
- Cleaning up broken links and high-priority 404 errors.
- Investigating canonical and sitemap issues.
- Analysing server logs to confirm how Google was crawling the site after the changes.
- Identifying and prioritising 50 oversized images for remediation.
- Monitoring server response times and documenting the remaining performance constraints.
This work meant old links could pass people and search authority to useful current pages instead of ending at an error. It also reduced the resources Google wasted crawling dead ends.
The impact appeared quickly. Before the new content was even live, the site had started appearing for more than 3,000 new search queries. Three had already reached the top five results, 20 were on page one and another 65 were on page two.
2. Build SEO Sandwiches around real questions
An SEO Sandwich is our structured, collaborative process for turning a real search opportunity into genuinely useful content. It puts SEO research and quality control around the client’s expertise, rather than asking a generic writer to guess what customers need.
- Layer 1, Matter supplies the search intelligence. We research the questions and search demand behind a potential visit, group related opportunities into connected topics, and write a detailed brief covering the primary question, supporting topics, keywords, structure, word count and internal links.
- Layer 2, RNA adds the expertise and voice. The RNA writer and editor add first-hand event knowledge and Ekka’s unmistakable voice on top of a strong framework, so the answers are accurate, human and genuinely useful.
- Layer 3, Matter finishes the SEO. We review the draft for accuracy, readability, natural keyword use, images, internal linking and the next useful action, then use performance data from each batch to find gaps and improve the next one.
Together we launched 23 new blogs and FAQs covering tickets, costs, transport, public holidays, quiet days, fireworks, showbags, family planning and the history behind Ekka. Each page answered a real question and directed readers towards the next useful step.
Matter did not replace the RNA team’s knowledge. We built a system that made that knowledge easier to find.
3. Build for search results and AI discovery
The content was structured to provide clear, direct answers rather than forcing people to dig through a long page. That helped it earn enhanced visibility in Google, including structured search result panels. By the end of the campaign, Ekka blog content was appearing in approximately 349 AI Overviews.
The campaign was not chasing AI as a separate trend. It was making Ekka’s information clear, useful and authoritative enough to be selected wherever people searched.
What changed
The technical and content work compounded into Ekka.
In June, organic clicks grew from 29,300 to 53,000 year on year, an increase of 80.9%. Search impressions rose from 252,000 to 496,000, an increase of 96.8%.
In a later 28-day comparison, Ekka had earned approximately 200,000 additional search impressions compared with the same period in 2024, and the new articles alone generated almost 10,000 clicks during that window. By July, the website had reached 1.06 million search impressions, up 52.5% from 695,000 the previous year. Clicks related to showbag searches increased by 70% year on year. The blog content was estimated to have attracted 155,640 visits and appeared in approximately 349 AI Overviews.
The keyword footprint
From roughly 2,600 keywords to a record 21,863, then back again.
The clearest measure of the campaign is the breadth of questions Ekka could answer. As the technical fixes landed and each SEO Sandwich went live, the number of organic keywords the site ranked for climbed through the entire 2025 build-up, reaching a record 21,863 in September, its highest level since tracking began in 2015.
The core positions held their ground throughout. Keywords ranking in positions 1 to 3 stayed strong, between roughly 430 and 610, across both years. What grew and then disappeared was the long tail, the thousands of specific, question-led searches the content program was built to answer. A year later, without an equivalent campaign, the same August and September build-up peaked at only around 900 organic keywords, a fraction of the previous year’s footprint.
Ahrefs organic keyword counts are estimates and move with each monthly index. Ekka is highly seasonal, so figures are compared at equivalent points in the year. The 2025 total includes the natural event-period spike. The like-for-like contrast with 2026, which had the same event but no active program, isolates the campaign’s contribution.
What happened when the campaign stopped
A brand this big absorbs the hit. Most businesses have nothing to absorb it with.
The 2025 project was a focused four-month campaign, not an ongoing retainer. The following year ran without the same SEO Sandwiches content program and technical support, which makes the two years a useful comparison.
Ekka is one of the strongest brands in Queensland. It has a fixed place in the calendar and its own public holiday, and a large seasonal audience searches for it by name every August whether or not anyone is doing SEO that year. That demand arrives on its own. So when the work stopped, the headline number moved, but it did not fall off a cliff.
Look underneath the brand and the picture changes. The searches that do not contain the word Ekka, the ones that have to be earned rather than inherited, fell much harder than the total. By August 2026, estimated non-branded traffic was down 34.5%, commercial-intent traffic was down 17.8%, transactional-intent traffic was down 14.2%, and the number of keywords ranking in the top 10 was down 22.8%. The keyword footprint went from a record 21,863 back to roughly 900.
That gap between the two numbers is the whole lesson. The brand protected the total. It did not protect the earned visibility, and earned visibility is the part that reaches people who were not already thinking of you.
Why this matters more if you are not Ekka
Most businesses have no cushion like that. There is no fixed week in the calendar when the whole state searches for them by name, and no public holiday doing the marketing. For them, non-branded search is not a layer sitting underneath the brand, it is the channel.
So the honest reading of this chart is not that pausing SEO costs a business roughly 10% to 25% of its traffic. It is that pausing SEO cost Ekka that much, because Ekka had a brand large enough to carry the difference. Run the same pause at a business without that brand and the drop would not be cushioned at all.
SEO performance is never shaped by one factor alone. Search demand, website changes, event differences and Google’s evolving results can all affect year-on-year performance. But the shape of the change is clear, and it is the shape that transfers: the earned half of the visibility was the half that went.
Why it worked
Focused work, where every piece supported the next.
- Foundation, clear the path. Technical improvements gave search engines a cleaner path through the website.
- Content, answer the question. Useful, question-led pages gave Google and AI better information to surface.
- Action, move people forward. Internal links connected each answer to the pages that moved people closer to attending.
Collaboration with the RNA team kept the answers accurate and unmistakably Ekka. It was not more activity for the sake of it. It was focused work that helped more people find Ekka, answer their questions and continue towards a ticket decision.
The takeaway
Fix the foundations. Answer the questions. Start early. Keep maintaining the asset.
Even one of Queensland’s best-known brands can lose valuable customers when its website makes discovery harder than it needs to be.
Fix the foundations. Use SEO Sandwiches to answer the questions people are already asking. Start early enough for the work to compound, and keep maintaining the asset once the event is over. That is how a four-month campaign became Ekka’s strongest organic performance in a decade. And if you do not have a brand the size of Ekka absorbing the difference, sustained search growth needs sustained attention even more than it did here.
If your customers are already searching, the question is whether they find you first. See how our SEO and technical SEO work turns the questions customers ask into visits, enquiries and sales.