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Our Work · Tourism and Hospitality

From 10 organic visits a month to 907.

Wild For Game Safaris had the safari expertise and almost no search footprint to carry it. Eighteen months later the site draws roughly 900 organic visits a month, every one of them non-branded, without a single paid click.

  • SEO
  • Content Strategy
  • AI Search

Project overview

Client
Wild For Game Safaris
Sector
Tourism and Hospitality
Service
SEOContent StrategyAI Search

907estimated organic visits a month, up from 10

The full story is below

Background

Expertise without a search footprint.

Wild For Game Safaris is a Botswana operator running photographic safaris through Moremi, Khwai, Savuti, Chobe and the Okavango Delta. The firsthand expertise was never in question.

The search footprint was. In August 2025 the site ranked for 10 keywords in total across every regional database Semrush tracks. In December 2025 it drew 10 organic visits in a month, nine of them from the United States and one from the Netherlands. Search was not an underperforming channel, it was not yet a channel at all.

That made the business dependent on people who already knew the name: referrals, repeat guests and word of mouth. A traveller researching a Botswana photographic safari from scratch had no realistic way of arriving at Wild For Game.

Project overview

Project overview

Client
Wild For Game Safaris
Location
Maun, Botswana
Window
February 2025 to August 2026
Website
wildforgamesafaris.com
907estimated organic visits a month, up from 10
1426organic keywords, up from 10
100per cent of that traffic non-branded

Results

The numbers, counted.

907estimated organic visits a month, up from 10
1,426organic keywords, up from 10
100per cent of that traffic non-branded
0paid clicks in any month of the window
Where the rankings landedSemrush Growth Report, August 2026. Page one is the first two rows combined, 218 keywords. The 402 in positions 11 to 20 are the next growth pool.
Positions 1 to 312
Positions 4 to 10206
Positions 11 to 20402
Estimated monthly organic visits by market, August 2026Semrush Growth Report, 2025 against 2026. Every market except the United States started from zero; the United States started from nine.
United States447
Other markets150
Canada129
Australia77
South Africa77
France27
Pages cited as sources inside AI answersSemrush AI Search toolkit, captured 10 August 2026. 59 citations in all, AI visibility score 14; 3.2 per cent of the Google results the site appears in are AI Overviews.
Google AI Mode47
Google AI Overview17
ChatGPT4
Gemini0

Semrush, Growth Report year on year, captured 10 August 2026 and re-verified against the Semrush API on 18 August 2026. Semrush labels the comparison 2025 against 2026; the organic visit baseline is December 2025 and the keyword baseline is August 2025.

A young leopard looking straight at the camera from dark undergrowth, photographed on a Wild For Game safari.

Wild For Game Safaris, Botswana

Found by people who had never heard the name.

A leopard, photographed from a Wild For Game vehicle. The photographs were never the problem. Nobody searching for a Botswana safari could find them.

The problem

Being found by people who have not heard of you.

Safari search is dominated by large publishers and booking aggregates with years of domain history. A small operator cannot outspend them and cannot out-publish them on volume.

What it can do is own the subjects it genuinely knows. The strategy was built on that: rather than chasing isolated high-volume keywords, build depth in the areas where firsthand safari experience is impossible for a generic publisher to reproduce.

Our approach

Four clusters, one journey.

01

Botswana wildlife

African wild dogs, cheetahs, hippos, leopards, predators and birds. The species travellers search for long before they search for an operator.

02

Photographic safaris

Botswana photography safaris, wildlife photography technique, photographic destinations and photography-specific trip planning. This is the company's commercial centre of gravity.

03

Safari planning

Costs, mobile safaris, accommodation choices, preparation and the questions travellers actually ask before they book.

04

Destinations

The areas Wild For Game actually operates in, connected back to the wildlife and photography content.

Two elephants face to face at a waterhole, tusks almost touching.
Elephants at a waterhole. Wildlife pages carried the first rankings while the destination and planning pages were still being built.

The mechanism

Discovery, education, planning, comparison, safari.

The clusters were built to connect. Someone arrives on a wild dog article today, meets the brand again weeks later while researching Botswana photography, and again while comparing mobile safaris against lodge stays.

Technical SEO made the site efficiently crawlable, internal linking joined informational articles to the destinations and safaris they relate to, and search intent decided the shape of each piece. Nothing here depended on a single article performing; the compounding came from the connections between them.

A pair of gemsbok walking through golden grassland in the Central Kalahari.

Botswana wildlifeGemsbok in the Central Kalahari. The species travellers search for long before they search for an operator.

A lioness licking her nose, filling the frame.

Photographic safarisA lioness at close range. Photography is the commercial centre of gravity, and the pages were built for the people who travel for it.

A cheetah standing in dry grassland, looking left.

DestinationsA cheetah on the pans. Moremi, Chobe, the Delta and the Kalahari, each connected back to the wildlife and photography pages.

The three clusters that connect, as scenes: a traveller arrives on a species, meets the brand again while researching photography, and again while choosing where to go.

The trajectory

Where the curve turned.

  • January and February 2026Groundwork. Visibility stayed low while the content architecture and technical base were built out.
  • March 2026The first breakthrough. Estimated organic traffic moved sharply to roughly 400 monthly visits as the cluster structure began to register.
  • April and May 2026Momentum. Traffic pushed beyond 600 monthly visits, with older content continuing to rank while new content added keywords.
  • June to August 2026A footprint rather than a spike. The site climbed in steps to its August level rather than in one jump.
A male lion lying in tall golden grass at the edge of water.
A lion at the water. A search for the species, not the company, is how almost every visit now begins.

Why non-branded matters

Reaching people before they know the name.

All 907 estimated visits are classified non-branded. Nobody in that figure typed the company name into Google.

That is the difference between a website that serves people who already found you and one that introduces you to people who have not. For an operator whose growth was previously capped by referral, it is the whole point of the exercise.

Authority signals

The domain strengthened alongside the content.

Signal20252026Change
Semrush Rank7.9M1.8M6,098,226 places
Backlinks99202+104 per cent
Referring domains83117+41 per cent
Paid traffic00none, throughout
An African wild dog standing on a bank at golden hour.African wild dog
A wild dog with pups in dry grass.Wild dog pups
A giraffe running across a dry pan.Giraffe
A cheetah cub on a fallen log in long grass.Cheetah cub
A leopard sitting on a log in the shade.Leopard
Guests crouched around a guide beside a safari vehicle on a dry pan.Guests on a drive
The subjects the site now owns in search, one after another: the species pages that carry the traffic, and the guests they are turning into.

The next chapter

Turning visibility into safari enquiries.

Getting discovered was the first problem and it is largely solved. The next is commercial: converting a large informational footprint into qualified enquiries.

The 402 keywords sitting in positions 11 to 20 are the clearest opportunity, because improving a page that already ranks is cheaper than creating one that does not. Beyond that, the work concentrates where informational authority meets buying intent: photographic safaris, planning across the areas the company operates in, and honest comparisons between itinerary styles.

In the client’s words

Testimonial

Lucas Tshupo, Founder and CEO, Wild For Game Safaris

“We've partnered with Brandesis for over a year, entrusting them with our SEO and social media management. Their services have been truly exceptional, consistently boosting our online presence and helping us connect with our audience.”

Lucas Tshupo, Founder and CEO, Wild For Game Safaris

Your competitors are ranking for the searches you are not.