SB Excursions: a Bali tours website in five languages, built to be found

SB Excursions runs private tours in Bali: volcano sunrises, Nusa Penida, snorkelling, temples and transfers. Travellers compare several operators before they write to anyone, and most of them start on Google, in their own language. The company needed a site that answers the practical questions — how long, what is included, how much, what happens next — and can be found for them.

Bookings were to stay a conversation with the organiser in WhatsApp, so the site had to lead to that message rather than to a checkout.

VITON¹³ designed and built the site: information architecture, interface, implementation and the search layer. The catalogue groups tours by intent — city tours, culture, Nusa Penida, islands, water, transport and helicopter — and every tour card repeats the same facts: duration, pickup, route points and price. Tour pages carry the route, the rating and a booking action; an AI planner lays out a week on the island; live weather, reviews, a journal of guides and an FAQ support the decision.

Every page exists in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and French, and part of the site also in German. Pages link to their language editions with hreflang and an x-default, declare a canonical URL and describe themselves in JSON-LD: TravelAgency, TouristTrip, Product with Offer, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and BlogPosting with Speakable. Titles give the practical answer, for example “Ubud Tour: 10 Hours, Hotel Pickup, $65 per Car + Tickets”.

A visitor can start from a category, a guide or the planner. Journal articles answer questions people search for — beaches, areas, whether a tour is worth it — and link to the tour that fits; the tour page then hands over to WhatsApp with the tour named. The sitemap lists every language edition, a separate image sitemap lists 6,738 photos, and robots.txt lets search engines and named AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read the content.

On 22 September 2026 the sitemap held 1,752 URLs: about 330 in each of the five main languages and 103 in German. In the owner’s Search Console report for the three months to 17 September, the site had 1.08K clicks and 92.2K impressions from Google web search, a 1.2% average click-through rate and an average position of 10.8.

Until early August the site received about 2.7 clicks and 230 impressions a day. From 7 August both rose within a week and held: from 14 August to 17 September the average was about 26 clicks and 2,300 impressions a day, with a peak of about 35 clicks on 3 September.

Search Console counts visits from Google, not bookings or revenue. Enquiries continue in WhatsApp, and conversion figures and the project budget are not published, so this case makes no claim about sales. It also cannot prove which change caused the rise on 7 August; indexing of the new language editions and the travel season may both play a part.

An average position of 10.8 means many queries still show the site on the second page of results. Lighthouse gives the home page 65 for performance on mobile, with a largest contentful paint of 7.8 s, so speed is a known weakness, not a strength.