The Northern Hotel ยท Billings, Montana
Hotel marketing case study
We moved the Northern Hotel to page 1 for hotel searches.
Brand strategy first, then the site, the local search work, and the campaigns built on top of it.
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By the numbers
Top 5
On “hotels in billings montana” and “billings hotels,” the searches that decide where visitors stay. Clicks on those searches quadrupled year over year.
+66%
Site traffic year over year, with 20,000+ new users in the quarter from the hotel’s target regions.
+38%
Direct traffic, people coming straight to the Northern by name because the brand pulled them.
2x
Faster site. A performance overhaul cut mobile load time in half, from 6.3 seconds to 2.9.
The situation
Known by everyone in Billings, invisible where travelers decide
The Northern Hotel is the landmark hotel of downtown Billings, with two of the city’s best-known restaurants, Bernie’s Diner and TEN, under its roof. People who know Billings know the Northern. The problem was the people who don’t: travelers picking a hotel from a search results page, where the Northern sat beneath the booking sites and chains on the exact searches that decide where visitors stay.
What we did
Brand strategy first. We set the position and rolled it out: a restructured website built around how guests actually look for a hotel, local search work, and the storytelling that makes a century-old hotel feel like the obvious choice rather than the historic option. Then we scaled the paid program on top of it, Google, Meta, and Instagram campaigns aimed at the markets that feed Billings. We rebuilt conversion tracking so every call and inquiry the marketing produces gets counted, and ran a technical pass on the site itself: structured data, indexing cleanup, and a performance overhaul that cut mobile load time in half and put the desktop speed score at 98 out of 100.
What changed
The searches that fill rooms moved to page 1. For “hotels in billings montana,” the Northern climbed from page 2 to position 4, and clicks quadrupled. “Billings hotels” moved into the top 3. Sitewide, the hotel’s average search position went from pages 2 and 3 to page 1 on mobile and desktop alike. Search impressions jumped, site traffic grew 66 percent, and direct traffic grew 38 percent. The paid program opened the hotel’s target regions, with traffic from those markets multiplying several times over. And the restaurants came along: Bernie’s Diner climbed from position 20 to position 2 on its own name and now wins searches like “breakfast billings mt.”
The search, traffic, and market numbers come from the accounts we operate for the hotel, comparing the most recent full quarter against the same dates a year earlier. The speed numbers are before-and-after PageSpeed measurements from the performance overhaul.
The rebuilt northernhotel.com, structured around how guests actually search for a hotel.
Rooms and suites, photographed and presented to sell the stay.
A custom map of walkable attractions around the hotel, built for the way visitors plan a downtown stay.
The work
Brand, campaign, and photography, all under one roof
Free brand audit
Find the gaps in your brand
The Northern’s turnaround started with a hard look at the brand. Our free brand audit gives you the same starting point: it scores your brand across the fifteen areas that decide whether travelers book with you or scroll past, and names the gaps.
“I love the site and the new visuals. It’s a really sharp site for the Northern. The phone rings more than it used to. They get how this hotel works, which is more than I can say for most people we’ve hired.”
Mike Nelson, Owner, The Northern HotelWhy it worked
One team, one strategy, every channel
None of this was a tactic. The brand strategy set who the Northern is for and what it should say, the website was rebuilt to match how those guests search, and the ad spend went to the markets the strategy named. One senior team ran all of it, from the positioning to the campaigns, which is how the work stayed pointed at the same goal for a year.
Want results you can count?
Tell us where your growth is stuck. We’ll tell you whether the brand, the site, or the reach is the constraint, and what we’d do about it.
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A brand agency in Billings, Montana. We set the brand strategy, then build the marketing on top of it, with one senior team from strategy through production.
406-998-7901team@letscanoe.com
119 N 29th St, Billings, MT 59101
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