Driving 437% Organic Traffic Growth: The NAMAS Adventure SEO Story

Starting Point

Namas Adventure is a UK-registered Himalayan expedition operator offering 7,000m and 8,000m climbs, peak climbing programmes, and trekking in Nepal. Its clients are from the UK, US, Europe, Australia, and other International markets.

When Makura Creations took over the account in February 2026, the website was already established and indexed by search engines. However, its organic growth had slowed down.

Data from Semrush, an SEO tool used to track website traffic and search performance, shows that Namas Adventure’s US organic traffic reached around 6,100 visits in July 2025. It then fell to around 4,000 visits by September and stayed at a similar level through February 2026. This showed that the website already had search visibility, but its organic traffic was no longer growing. 

The site also had limited first-page rankings. Only 225 keywords were ranking in positions 4–10, while nearly 2,000 keywords were on page two or lower. This meant there was a large opportunity to move existing rankings higher and bring in more relevant traffic.

The website also faced several other challenges:

• Limited content coverage: Key expedition and trekking topics were not fully covered, making it harder to compete with larger international operators.
• Technical SEO issues: Duplicate titles and heading tags, broken links, crawl errors, unoptimised images, and page-speed issues were affecting the site.
• Inconsistent content publishing: There was no regular publishing process to keep building search visibility.
• Incomplete tracking: Conversion tracking was not fully set up, making it harder to measure enquiries and other important actions.
• Inactive local profile: The local business profile existed but was not being regularly managed.

Namas Adventure had an established website and strong industry credibility. It needed a clear and consistent SEO strategy to build on its existing foundation for steady growth.

The approach

Makura Creations worked on Namas Adventure’s SEO through a consistent monthly strategy rather than treating it as a one-time website audit. The work focused on content, technical improvements, search visibility, and building authority.

Content Strategy

• Content was the main part of the SEO strategy. We expanded Namas Adventure’s coverage of 7,000m and 8,000m expeditions by creating content around the questions climbers research before booking an expedition. Topics included the cost of climbing Everest, the Death Zone, K2 vs. Everest, weather windows, Ama Dablam preparation, the world’s deadliest mountains, Green Boots, and honey hunting.
• New blog content was published regularly, along with improvements to existing trekking and expedition pages. Before creating each piece, we used Semrush, an SEO research tool, to check search demand and competition for the topic.
• We also improved important expedition and trekking pages, including Himlung Himal, Annapurna IV, Putha Hiunchuli, Meru Peak, Lobuche, Khumbu 3 Peak, Dolpo Circuit, and K2. These pages were developed to provide useful information while targeting high-priority search terms.
• The homepage was also improved to clearly position Namas Adventure as a Himalayan mountaineering and expedition company. Internal links were added from informative blog posts to relevant expedition pages, helping visitors move from learning about a topic to exploring an actual trip.

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

• Content was structured to make important information easier for both users and search engines to understand. We added direct question-and-answer sections, clear definitions, and comparison tables.
• Schema markup was also added to priority expedition pages. This helps search engines better understand the information on a page and became one of the strongest-performing parts of the SEO work.

Technical & on-page SEO

• Fixed duplicate title and heading-tag issues site-wide: 24 pages in the first pass, then 28, 86, and 91 on-page updates across the following months.
• Resolved crawl errors, 404s, and broken links; reviewed sitemap, robots.txt, canonicals, and SSL.
• We also improved page speed and image optimisation. These changes helped increase the website’s Core Web Vitals score from 80 to 83, indicating an improvement in key aspects of page performance.

Off-page & authority

• We worked on building Namas Adventure’s online authority through relevant backlinks and external placements. This included directories, article submissions, forums, social bookmarking, and climbing-related platforms.
• The brand’s presence was also expanded across travel platforms such as TripAdvisor, TourRadar, TourHQ, and GetYourGuide.
• The website now has around 1,500 backlinks from 596 referring domains, with a Semrush Authority Score of 34.

Local & tracking

• Namas Adventure’s Google Business Profile and Yandex Maps listing were regularly updated with services, posts, and images related to the current campaigns.
• We also set up and verified Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console. Contact-form tracking was added so the team could see where enquiries were coming from and measure the results of the SEO work more accurately.

The ranking growth story

The main result was moving high-priority keywords higher in Google search results. As the table below shows, many keywords moved from lower positions to the first page, with several reaching the top positions.

Six commercial expedition terms hold position 1. Putha Hiunchuli moved from page two to the top spot.

Winning the AI answer layer

This is the result that matters most at this time, but most operators are not tracking it at all.

AI search is becoming an important part of how users discover information online. Google now places AI Overviews alongside traditional search results. Namas Adventure’s content strategy was designed to provide clear, useful answers to the questions climbers and trekkers search for before booking an expedition.Namas Adventure is being cited inside those answers at scale:

The mechanism is not a trick. AI Overviews pull answers from content that answers a question directly, in structured form, from a source with topical credibility. Building genuine depth on Himalayan expeditions created the foundation for both stronger organic visibility and increased AEO presence.

The traffic results

The real impact is visible in the engagement data. From February to August 2026, the website recorded 12K active users, 199K events, and 18K sessions, with all three key metrics showing positive growth.

This was not the result of a single traffic spike. Engagement remained steady throughout the period and increased further in August as more pages started gaining visibility in search results. 

The graph shows changes in traffic over the period, with a clear spike in May and stronger activity in August. The focus throughout was on steady growth by strengthening existing content, combining overlapping expedition pages, and publishing consistently. 

The result is continued growth across users, sessions, and overall engagement, demonstrating that increased organic visibility is translating into meaningful website activity.

Real search visibility, verified in Search Console

The client’s own Search Console data confirms the scale, independent of third-party estimates:

Monthly impressions increased 145% between February and August 2026, crossing 1.5 million in August. At the same time, the site maintained an average position within the top 10, showing that the increase in visibility was accompanied by strong search rankings.

Local search

Local SEO performance also improved consistently, with Google Business Profile views increasing from 227 to 437 (up 92%), while direction requests grew from 38 to 57 per month (up 50%). Local pack rankings for target keywords remained stable at Position 4.

Where the opportunity goes next

Seven months in, the site has come a long way from where it started. It now has a solid organic foundation, and search visibility is turning into real business opportunities. 

• Around 550 keywords are ranking in positions 4–10. Many of these are already close to the top three, so the September 2026 plan focuses on improving what is already working. That means refreshing 15 existing posts, rather than simply adding more new content.
• Ama Dablam is still one of the clearest opportunities. The page is currently sitting at position 7 for a high-intent search, leaving room to improve its visibility further.
• The 0.6–0.7% CTR from 1.53M impressions also shows there is more value to unlock from the visibility the site already has. Updating titles and meta descriptions for the pages getting the most impressions could help turn more of those searches into clicks.
• AI visibility is growing as well, with 2,332 AI Overview citations and counting. The next stage will put more focus on creating clear, structured expedition content that can be picked up across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
• And this is where the growth becomes more meaningful: the website is now bringing in good-quality leads, with conversion tracking helping connect organic traffic to enquiries. The focus is no longer just on getting more visitors or moving up the rankings. It is about understanding which content brings in enquiries and, ultimately, supports high-value expeditions.