Case Study — Hospitality
Marlow's on the Kenai
A salmon fishing lodge in Alaska with a WordPress site that was slow, hard to find, and structurally invisible to search engines. We rebuilt it from scratch on Astro 6 and deployed to Vercel. The SEO score didn't creep up — it jumped.
The Problem
A beautiful lodge. An invisible website.
Marlow's on the Kenai runs guided salmon fishing trips out of Alaska — a competitive hospitality niche where search visibility matters as much as word of mouth. The existing WordPress site looked decent but was structurally broken from an SEO standpoint: no schema, missing meta descriptions, bloated theme assets, and a Lighthouse SEO score of 28.
The content existed — packages, trip types, seasons, testimonials — but it wasn't organized in a way Google could parse or reward. Internal linking was thin, page titles were generic, and there was no structured data telling search engines what the business actually offered.
The performance ceiling of the WordPress setup meant these problems couldn't be patched — they had to be rebuilt.
What We Did
A full rebuild — not a tune-up.
WordPress → Astro 6
Migrated the entire site to Astro 6 with zero JavaScript shipped by default. Static HTML, near-instant load times, and Core Web Vitals that pass out of the box.
22 pages + MDX blog
Structured content covering trip types, seasonal packages, species pages, and guide bios. The blog infrastructure is live for future content — seasons, tips, regulations.
Schema + meta overhaul
LocalBusiness and TouristAttraction schema added. Every page got a unique title, meta description, and Open Graph tag. No more generic templates.
Internal linking architecture
Trip type pages link to species pages, species pages link to booking. Clean hierarchical structure that distributes authority and helps Google understand topic relationships.
Deployed to Vercel
Global CDN deployment with automatic HTTPS. Sub-100ms TTFB for US visitors. No hosting invoice for the client.
GSC + sitemap submitted
Google Search Console wired and verified. XML sitemap submitted on launch day so indexing starts immediately.
The Stack
Astro 6 + Vercel + MDX
Astro's island architecture ships zero JS for static content pages, which is the right call for a lodging site — no interactive components needed for a trip description or booking CTA page. Every page renders as fast static HTML.
MDX blog infrastructure means future content (fishing reports, trip recaps, seasonal guides) can be added without touching the build system. The editorial workflow is a Markdown file + a commit.
Results
Structural SEO. Measurable lift.
The SEO score lift was entirely structural — no black-hat tactics, no link schemes. Proper meta tags, unique titles per page, schema markup that labels what the business actually is, and clean URL routing. These are the fundamentals. They just have to be done right. The WordPress setup wasn't doing them right.
Takeaways
What this project teaches.
You don't need to publish 500 blog posts to move a Lighthouse SEO score. The score reflects technical correctness — are your pages structured in a way search engines can read, parse, and understand? A clean Astro build with proper schema answers yes to every one of those questions from day one.
For hospitality businesses competing on local and long-tail search ("Alaska salmon fishing lodge," "Kenai River guided trips"), the structural foundation matters before content volume. You can't publish your way out of a broken technical setup.
The MDX blog infrastructure is already in place. The next growth lever — content — has no technical barriers.
Your site has the same problems.
Most WordPress and theme-built sites do. Book a strategy call — we'll audit what you have and show you exactly what's holding your SEO score and rankings back.