Nicholas Air
Nicholas Air is a private aviation company offering jet cards, fractional ownership, and aircraft management. They were growing fast, 62% year-over-year, but almost nobody was finding them through Google. Their keywords were “buried” on page two or worse, three previous SEO agencies had done more harm than good, and nearly all organic traffic came from people who already knew the brand. DAP built them an SEO strategy, technical audit, and keyword research plan to change that. The deliverables mapped out 150+ priority keywords, a 36-article content calendar, and a clear path to 10K+ monthly organic visitors and $127K in projected monthly revenue.
Nicholas Air is a private aviation company based in Oxford, Mississippi. They offer jet card programs, fractional ownership, jet leases, and full aircraft management for owners who want someone else handling the operations. They compete directly with NetJets, Flexjet, and JetLinx, but built their reputation on a more personal, service-first approach. The company grew 62% in a single year, driven almost entirely by word-of-mouth referrals and paid media.
How We Helped Nicholas Air
Project Summary
Nicholas Air brought DAP in to figure out why a company growing 62% a year was practically invisible on Google. The answer: years of SEO mismanagement, a technically broken website, and zero content strategy. DAP delivered a full SEO audit, keyword research across 150+ terms, and a 12-month content plan, giving Nicholas Air everything they needed to start ranking for “jet card programs,” “private jet card,” and the search terms their competitors were already winning.
The Challenge
Organic Search Buried in Search Rankings
Nicholas Air's head of marketing put it bluntly: their keywords were "super buried." Terms like "jet card programs," "private jet card," and "jet share" were stuck at the bottom of page two or worse. Almost all organic traffic was branded. The only people finding them on Google were people who already knew the name.
Agency History Three Failed SEO Agencies
In four years, Nicholas Air hired and fired three SEO agencies. Each time, traffic dropped. Worse, the agencies left behind toxic backlink profiles and half-finished strategies that actively hurt rankings. By the time DAP got involved, the site was in worse shape than before any agency touched it.
Competitive Landscape Competitors Pulling Ahead
While Nicholas Air stood still, competitors were moving. JetLinx had overtaken them for "jet card programs." NetJets' organic traffic was up 10%. Both were publishing new content regularly. Every month Nicholas Air waited, the gap got wider.
Technical Issues Website Not Optimized for Google
The website itself was holding them back. Over 200 technical issues (missing meta descriptions, broken social tags, poor internal linking, unoptimized images) were dragging down rankings. Technical SEO accounts for roughly half of how Google scores a site, and Nicholas Air was leaving most of those points on the table.
How we Helped Nicholas Air
SEO & Content Strategy
DAP started with the question Nicholas Air’s previous agencies never answered: what would it actually take to rank? The team ran strategy sessions with marketing leadership, researched the competition, and came back with a plan.
- Worked directly with Nicholas Air's VP of Marketing to define priorities: jet cards first, then jet shares, jet leases, and aircraft management
- Mapped 150+ target keywords across all service lines, scored by search volume, ranking difficulty, and buyer intent
- Built a 12-month content calendar: 12 long-form pillar articles (3,000+ words) and 24 short-form supporting pieces
- Benchmarked Nicholas Air against NetJets, Flexjet, JetLinx, and Wheels Up to find gaps they could exploit
- Laid out a backlink strategy focused on aviation and business publications
Technical SEO Audit
Half of how Google ranks a site comes down to technical factors. DAP crawled every page on nicholasair.com and delivered a prioritized fix list: 200+ issues, ranked by how much each one was hurting rankings.
- Found and cataloged 200+ technical issues across the entire domain
- Flagged toxic backlinks left behind by previous agencies for disavowal
- Identified internal linking gaps and recommended a hub-and-spoke architecture to spread authority across pages
- Audited page speed, mobile experience, image optimization, and Core Web Vitals
- Delivered a prioritized remediation plan, estimated 40–60 hours of developer work, broken down by task
Keyword Research & Competitive Intelligence
It wasn’t enough to know which keywords mattered. Nicholas Air needed to know which ones they could actually win. DAP scored every keyword by volume, difficulty, and how much revenue it could drive, then showed exactly where competitors had left the door open.
- Organized keyword targets by service line: jet cards (top priority), jet shares, jet leases, and aircraft management
- Studied what NetJets, Flexjet, JetLinx, and Wheels Up were publishing, and found the gaps they weren't covering
- Matched each keyword to search intent so content would answer what buyers were actually asking
- Spotted quick wins like "where can I use my jet card" and "best jet card program" with lower competition, high relevance
- Modeled the upside: 10,000+ monthly organic visitors and an estimated $127K/month in customer value
What we Achieved
DAP’s technical audit turned up over 200 problems on nicholasair.com: missing meta descriptions, broken social tags, toxic backlinks from years of neglect, page speed issues. The usual stuff that piles up when three agencies come and go without finishing anything. Every issue got a severity score and a fix, organized into a 40–60 hour remediation roadmap their dev team could start on immediately.
DAP mapped over 150 keywords across Nicholas Air’s four service lines: jet cards, jet shares, jet leases, and aircraft management. Each one was scored for search volume, how hard it would be to rank, and what it was actually worth in revenue. The result was a prioritized hit list. Not just “these keywords matter,” but “go after these ones first, in this order, for these reasons.”
DAP built a 12-month calendar with 36 articles: one long-form pillar piece per month (3,000+ words with infographics) plus two shorter supporting articles. Every piece had a specific keyword target and a reason for existing: some to rank for high-value terms, some to answer questions buyers ask before they’re ready to call, some to outflank what competitors were already publishing.
DAP pulled apart the SEO strategies of NetJets, Flexjet, JetLinx, and Wheels Up: what they were publishing, which keywords they owned, where their backlinks came from, and how their traffic was trending. The goal wasn’t just to understand the competition. It was to find the gaps none of them were covering, topics and keywords where Nicholas Air could rank without going head-to-head against companies spending ten times more.
