The Tourist Organisation of the Municipality of Backa Topola is the public body that promotes the area: Zobnatica and its horse races, the spa at Pacir, the pools at Stara Moravica, lavender fields, a sarma festival and some twenty other events a year, across 23 villages and in three languages.
When we took the website over at the end of 2023, it existed. Nobody could really use it.
Tourists do not look for tourist organisations
Picture a family from Belgrade. It is Saturday, it is hot, and the kids are climbing the walls. Someone has heard there is a good pool in Stara Moravica. Mum picks up her phone and types: “stara moravica pool opening hours”. Then: “stara moravica pool price”.
She is not looking for a tourist organisation. She does not know one exists. (She does not need to.) She wants two answers before she puts the towels in the car.
That is what this whole project rests on. A tourist organisation’s website does the same job as a good desk at an information centre: someone walks in with a question and walks out with an answer. If the desk has a locked door, the tourist does not knock. They go to the next one.
The analytics confirm it. Most visitors come from Belgrade, then Novi Sad, and only then from Backa Topola itself. Three out of four visits come from Google search.
What we found
The 2023 website was in Cyrillic, with a four-item menu: Home, Offer, Events, Contact. Everything a tourist looks for was buried somewhere under “Offer”.
The events page was a list of about twenty lines: name, month, place. No dates, no pictures, no links. (If you were interested in the sarma festival, you knew it was “in October”. Good luck.)
The Pacir spa page had good text and large empty areas between the paragraphs, where photos and a video were supposed to be.
The site was too heavy for the server it ran on, so a page could take up to a minute to load. Google Analytics and Search Console were not connected. Nobody knew how many people came, from where, or what they were looking for.
(That is why there are no “before” numbers here. They did not exist.)
Like a guide who knows the answer before you ask
A good tour guide does not tell you everything they know. They tell you what you want to know, in the order you want to know it. Where to park, when it opens, how much it costs, what else is nearby.
We built the website in that order.
First we made it work. At the end of 2023 we took over maintenance, tidied the site up in Elementor and connected analytics and Search Console, so it could be used and measured at all. The server stayed the same: instead of moving, we made the site lighter and put it behind Cloudflare.
Then we listened to what people type. Once data started coming in, we saw the questions: pool opening hours, ticket prices, when the horse races are, where to swim, where to stay. Those questions became a page for the Stara Moravica pools, with opening hours and prices at the top.
Then we rebuilt the site from scratch in Bricks. Elementor did its job as a first step, but a site with this much content cannot be run as a pile of separate pages. Every place to stay, sight, activity, village, event and gallery is now its own entry with the same fields: address, phone, map, date, photos. Whoever adds a new event fills in the fields. The calendar, the homepage and the cards update themselves.
A menu built around visitors’ questions. Info, Activities, Surroundings, Guides, Events, Gallery. On the homepage, right below the main photo, come the upcoming events with dates, then “What to see, what to do, where to stay, surroundings”.
Three languages, no gaps. Serbian, Hungarian and English, each with its own page addresses. Village pages that had sat empty in Hungarian and English for years now have a translation.
Nothing from the old site was lost. Before the switch we listed every old link Google knew: 295 pages and 697 images. Each one now leads to the right place on the new site. We also found 139 links Google still remembered from the site before Elementor, and pointed them to the matching pages.
Speed. Without caching, the homepage could take more than 20 seconds to load. After setting up caching and Cloudflare, the same page arrives in under half a second.
What happened
For a tourist organisation, summer is what December is for a toy shop. So we compare summer with summer.
From June to August 2026 the site got 56% more visits from Google search than the same summer a year earlier. And it did so with fewer appearances in search: people skipped it less often and chose it more often. Its average position in search improved from eighth to sixth.
Most of that growth comes from one page: the Stara Moravica pools. For searches like “stara moravica pool” the site sits in the top three results, and roughly one in five people who see it click.
There is something new as well. Search Console now shows separately how often a site appears in Google’s AI answers (AI Overviews and AI Mode). From July to October 2026, in three months: 16,100 times, from 303 different pages. In first place, again, is the Stara Moravica pools page, followed by the Hungarian Pacir spa page and the Zobnatica horse races.
The logic is the same as in ordinary search. When an AI puts together an answer to “when is the pool open”, it takes it from the page that says so clearly.
Other AI assistants send people too. Since June 2026 the analytics have recorded visits from AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and the like): 104 so far, about 25 a month. Small next to Google search. But each one is a person who asked an AI about Backa Topola and got a link to this exact site in the answer.
The mum from Belgrade got her opening hours and her price. The tourist organisation got a visitor it would never have known about.
In fairness, here is what is not finished yet. The Bricks version has only been live since the end of September 2026, so we will see its effect on search next season.
What you can take for your own website, even without us
Open Search Console (it is free) and look at the queries report for the last three months. Find the questions that start with “how much”, “when”, “where”, “opening hours”. Every one of those your site does not answer clearly at the top of a page is a visitor who went somewhere else.
If Search Console is not connected, that is the first job. Without it you are guessing.
When this makes sense, and when it does not
It makes sense when a site has a lot of content that keeps changing (events, accommodation, prices, opening hours) and when several people add content. Then a tidy structure saves time every time someone adds a new event.
It does not make sense if a site has five pages that have not changed in years. Then fixing the text and the speed is enough.
And it does not happen overnight. A tourism website is measured in seasons, not weeks.
If you have a website full of content that nobody can find, see how we approach web design and website maintenance, or request a quote.
P.S. In short: a Cyrillic website with four menu items, no analytics, pages taking up to a minute to load. Today: three languages, an events calendar that updates itself, and 56% more visits from Google summer on summer.
P.P.S. The page that brought the most visits is not the homepage. It is the page about the Stara Moravica pools, made because we saw people asking for opening hours and prices. Nobody would have come up with it sitting at a desk.