Five garden cottages, run by one family since 1996, on a 2019 website that was slow on a phone, hard to book from and invisible to AI search. We rebuilt it on the same WordPress: faster, made for the thumb, and written to be found.
keurboom.co.za
No. 01The brief
A quiet garden the internet could not find.
De Keurboom is five self-catering cottages on one garden property in Amandelrug, Kuils River. Guests are business travellers for Brackengate and Saxenburg, families visiting Netcare Kuils River Hospital, and wine-route weekenders heading for Stellenbosch.
The old site took 16 seconds to load on a phone. The house rules lived in a PDF, there was no map, no structured data and no clear way to book from a small screen.
The brief: keep the name, the slate-blue roofline and WordPress. Make it fast, make it book, and make sure Google, Bing and the AI assistants can describe it correctly.
Nothing about the place changed. The cottages, the rates and the family are the same. What changed is how quickly a guest on a phone gets from “where is it?” to “book it”.
2019
keurboom.co.za (2019)
16.2 sto load the home page on a mid-range phone
2026
keurboom.co.za
Under 4 ssame phone, same network, same photos
No. 03In numbers
Small property. Big list of fixes.
4x
faster home page on a phone
5
cottages, each with its own booking card
6
new pages for guests searching by place
18
pages in the sitemap, each with its own title
16
awards and badges back on show
0
errors in Bing’s scan of 19 pages
No. 04Mobile
Made for one thumb, on the way from the airport.
Most guests find De Keurboom on a phone. Every screen was rebuilt and tested at 390 px wide, then checked again on a slow connection.
Home
Photo hero, facts strip and two clear buttons above the fold.
Menu
A full-height drawer that opens over everything, phone numbers included.
Cottages
Luxury and standard filters side by side, not stacked.
Booking card
Check-in, deposit, pets and cancellation in plain words.
Talk to us
WhatsApp, mobile and landline, one tap away.
Sticky “Book now” bar on every page
Solid white header on phones
Lighter hero photos cropped for phones
Square buttons, big enough to tap
Menu works after scrolling
Map you can tap, not drag by accident
No. 05The cottage page
keurboom.co.za/room/weslyn-cottage
One page per cottage, and it answers the questions before they are asked.
Price first
From R830 a night for the whole cottage, sleeps 6, with a link straight to the rate table.
The facts grid
Check-in from 14:00, check-out by 10:00, R800 refundable deposit, no pets.
Cancellation in plain words
Full deposit back 28 days or more before arrival, half at 15 to 28 days, none inside 14 days.
House rules out of the PDF
A real page at /house-rules/, linked from every booking card and the footer.
Book in one tap
The sticky bar and the card both go straight to Nightsbridge, the live booking engine.
No. 06Location
Where it is, is why people book.
Guests rarely search for “guesthouse”. They search for the place they need to be near. So the home page swapped a photo for a live map, and six new pages answer those searches directly.
keurboom.co.za
Netcare Kuils River Hospital
5 min
Brackengate Business Park
7 min
Saxenburg Business Park
7 min
Cape Town International Airport
20 min
Stellenbosch Winelands
25 min
University of the Western Cape
Bellville
Six pages, six trips
“Accommodation near Brackengate Business Park.” “Stay near Cape Town Airport.” Each page has its own title, description, breadcrumbs and FAQs, written for the person making that trip, and each links back to the cottages.
People now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini where to stay. Those tools can only recommend what they can read, so every fact on the site is in plain text and in structured data.
Classic search
One h1 per page, real heading order
Unique titles under 60 characters, descriptions under 155
Canonical URLs, sitemap and robots.txt
Open Graph and Twitter cards for sharing
Alt text on every image, map tiles included
301 redirects from every old address
AI search
LodgingBusiness, FAQ and breadcrumb structured data
FAQ answers in plain text, not hidden in accordions
llms.txt: a plain summary for AI tools at the site root
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended allowed
IndexNow tells Bing the moment a page changes
Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4 connected
# De Keurboom Guesthouse
> Self-catering guesthouse accommodation in
> Kuils River, Cape Town. Established 1996.
> Five individually styled cottages near
> Brackengate, Saxenburg, the airport and
> the Cape Winelands.
Bing site scan
0
errors and 0 warnings across 19 pages, one day after launch.
No. 08Reviews and awards
Sixteen badges, back where guests can see them.
Years of TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Afristay, AccommoDirect and Lilizela recognition were scattered or missing. They now sit together on one page, next to the Google rating and the sites where guests leave reviews.
keurboom.co.za/our-place/reviews-awards
4.5/ 5
from 79 Google reviews, shown on the home page and the contact page.
No. 09Colour and type
A slate roof and a gold front door.
The colours come straight from the logo’s roofline. Gold is kept for the one thing that matters most, booking, and always carries dark text so it passes contrast checks.
Slate#73889D · Roofline, bars
Slate ink#4A6076 · Header text, hero
Gold#BDA85A · Buttons
Garden#F4F6F2 · Section bands
Charcoal#2B2F33 · Footer
Ink#1B1B1B · Body headings
Aa
Raleway
Raleway Light for headings, uppercase and spaced for place names: WESLYN COTTAGE.
Aa
Open Sans
Open Sans for everything you read, 16 px and up on phones.
Check availabilityExplore cottagesBook now
From R830/night
Whole cottage, self-catering.
Check-in
From 14:00
Check-out
By 10:00
Deposit
R800, refundable
Pets
Not allowed
New faviconRoofline and K, in slate ink
No. 10Launch night, 16/10/2026
Switched over in one evening, with the old site kept safe.
The 2019 site was never deleted. It moved to old.keurboom.co.za, hidden from search, ready to restore in minutes if anything went wrong. Nothing did.
Both databases and every server setting backed up
Old site moved to old.keurboom.co.za and hidden from search
New site moved to keurboom.co.za, 2,193 links rewritten
Every old address redirected, so no link or ranking was lost
All 15 form emails pointed to the guesthouse inbox
SSL, GA4, Search Console, Bing and IndexNow switched on
