Turning 72 natural springs into a content engine that fills weekday rooms

Stratum II · Core samples

The audit: six cores drilled through the old site

1. 01 · International

   One language, four markets

   All 212 URLs served html lang="bg" with no hreflang. Greek and Romanian visitors were IP-redirected to the Bulgarian homepage, so Google never saw an alternate version to rank.

2. 02 · Content

   61 of 72 springs undocumented

   Spring pages averaged 140 words. Temperature, mineralisation and indications — the exact details wellness travellers search for — lived in a scanned PDF.

3. 03 · Technical

   Room pages set to noindex

   A staging rule left /rooms/ blocked, so 64% of brand-plus-booking queries landed on OTA listings that charged 17–22% commission.

4. 04 · Schema

   No structured data at all

   No Hotel, FAQPage or offer markup; package prices were baked into images, invisible to search engines and screen readers.

5. 05 · AI search

   Zero AI-overview citations

   Across 120 tracked mineral-therapy questions, the spa was never cited; a Hisarya competitor was cited 14 times from one well-structured guide.

6. 06 · Local

   Profile in Bulgarian only

   The Business Profile used only the "Hotel" category, Bulgarian descriptions and no spa services, so it was missing from "spa near Velingrad" in other languages.

Stratum III · Sediment

The strategy: lay down the strata, then let demand rise

Built on our Content Engine plan: content is laid down in clusters like sediment, then four tactics open the fissures that carry searchers up to a booking.

• Fissure 1

  Topic clusters

  Four clusters, from the springs themselves down to the wider Rhodopes, each with one pillar page and 24–46 spokes. Every spoke links up to its pillar and across to the booking package it supports, so authority flows toward rooms, not away from them.

• Fissure 2

  Hreflang

  Native-written BG, EL, RO and HE sections on subfolders, with reciprocal hreflang in the sitemap, an English x-default hub and IP redirects replaced by a dismissible language suggestion. Hebrew uses RTL templates rather than mirrored CSS hacks.

• Fissure 3

  AI Overviews

  Each spoke opens with a 40–60-word answer paragraph, cites the spring's lab readings with dates, and names the balneologist who reviewed it — the factual, sourced shape AI Overviews quote from.

• Fissure 4

  FAQ schema

  FAQPage and Hotel markup on every cluster page, with Offer data for weekday packages. Questions came from real search data in each language, not translations of one list.

Explore the four content strata

Select a layer (arrow keys work) to see its pillar, sample spokes and AI-overview citations.

Stratum IV · Aquifer

14 months, month by month

The water level in each core is the modelled direct-booking index for that month.

1. M1 · SurveyCore samplesCrawl, log-file and OTA-dependency audit; 212 Bulgarian-only URLs mapped to intent.
2. M2 · SurveyCluster mapFour topic clusters defined from 1,840 queries across BG, EL, RO and HE.
3. M3 · DrillSprings pillar liveSpring-by-spring data pages with temperature, chemistry and FAQ schema.
4. M4 · DrillGreek goes liveNative-written Greek section, hreflang el-GR / el-CY, reciprocal tags validated.
5. M5 · DrillTherapies clusterCondition pages reviewed by the in-house balneologist; MedicalTherapy markup.
6. M6 · FlowRomanian goes liveRomanian section with Bucharest travel guides; x-default set to English hub.
7. M7 · FlowAnswer blocks40-word answer paragraphs on every spoke page, built for AI Overviews.
8. M8 · FlowBooking engineDirect-booking widget on cluster pages; GA4 events wired per language.
9. M9 · FlowHebrew goes liveRTL templates, he-IL hreflang, Tel Aviv flight content and kosher-meal FAQ.
10. M10 · RiseWeekday packagesSunday–Thursday cure pages rank top 3 in all four languages.
11. M11 · RiseRhodopes clusterDestination pages earn links from 9 regional travel publishers.
12. M12 · RiseRefresh cycleSeasonal re-crawl; 22 pages refreshed with new spring readings.
13. M13 · PoolOTA rebalanceTwo OTA allotments reduced as direct share passes 41%.
14. M14 · PoolYear-one review31 AI-overview citations; roadmap set for German and Polish.

Stratum V · The source

Results: what came up through the rock

Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.

Rankings across four languages