TMobilitat- Projects

Boosted organic positioning beyond brand searches

It's true that, in Barcelona, it's hard not to be familiar with T-Mobilitat. This is the public transport network's digital ticketing system for travel within the metropolitan area. This service facilitates mobility through the so-called 7 crowns, offering coverage far beyond the capital. For all these reasons, it is the go-to system for the metro, trains, and buses.

But what about those who aren't regular users of public transport? Or those who are unfamiliar with the brand and are searching for it on a one-off or situational basis? The same goes for people just passing through. Barcelona is both a tourist city and a hub where thousands of people need to travel daily, and the public transport network seeks to address that need.

As digital users, we don't always go directly to a brand to resolve a question. We're used to searching for specific needs or specific options, especially when it comes to travel.

For example: how do we reach that person who Googles "how to travel by bus from one part of Barcelona" without directly mentioning T-Mobilitat?

The Challenge

Increase organic traffic for generic searches related to the service, without relying on the brand

T-Mobilitat mainly attracted searches such as “t mobilitat” and brand-related variations. There was a challenge to rank for more general keywords like “transport card in Barcelona” or specific tickets like the T-usual. On one hand, the content had not been developed with a user-focused approach; on the other, there were no dedicated pages for the tickets that addressed those specific searches. In addition, T-Mobilitat lost visibility against TMB, Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona, which dominated most of the results as the main brand.

Results

Significant organic growth in searches for general terms and specific ticket-related queries, reaching top positions.

Average Position: record improvement in the domain’s overall ranking, moving from position 17.5 to 4.8.
Increase in organic clicks and impressions: consistent growth trend, with periods that doubled historical figures.
Visibility: +450% in the Sistrix visibility index.
Keyword rankings: better positioning and visibility than the main brand TMB for key searches.
Tourist engagement: daily clicks doubled on the English version of the website.

The Solution

Keyword research based on user search types, content optimization, and technical SEO.

A keyword research and a technical audit were carried out to align content efforts with the optimization of the web environment.

Detection of terms with the highest search volume: priority was given to the keywords users were searching for but that the brand was not covering. Examples: “transport card,” “bus card,” or “metro fares.”
OnPage Optimization: titles without SEO intent and poorly structured headers were redesigned; in addition, the content was adjusted to user searches.
Creation of product pages: tickets did not have individual pages, which made it difficult to rank for directly related terms.
Technical improvements: adjustments in hreflang, robots.txt, canonicals, and fixing crawling and indexing errors (low-value URLs, poorly contextualized internal linking, auto-generated indexed pages, etc.).
Linkbuilding strategy in media: strengthening the brand’s reputation on topics of greatest interest to users.
Implementation of structured data: FAQ schema on key pages, with content that directly answered users’ specific questions.

T-Mobilitat

Identify the searches performed by users to rank the most relevant ones at the top of the results.