SEO migration & content strategy drive Car Leasing organic search authority

Car Leasing

Project Overview

Car Leasing has been in business for over 25 years organising car leases for customers and the financial arrangements for the vehicles.

In 2018 Herd was hired as the SEO agency for Car Leasing prior to their new website re-design/re-launch. Our team worked with Car Leasing's external developers to provide the technical SEO support required for a successful migration and provided essential input into the information architecture and on-page optimisation.

Over the past year Herd have developed an informational content strategy positioning Car Leasing as the go-to online knowledge authority on all things leasing and automotive. Our strategy has helped the site rank for more terms in search engines, and improved the domain authority and overall organic search visibility, resulting in some very impressive ROI and engagement.

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Our multi-channel marketing approach generated excellent results in the highly competitive automotive sector

A selection of key statistics from this project:

+127% Growth in organic traffic YOY
+263% Increase in ranking keywords
+128% Growth in Vehicle Lease Quote Leads YOY
50/100 Domain Authority Increase from 14/100

The Brief

By the end of 2018 we’d already seen improvements in traffic from organic search since our successful migration and launch of the new site. At that point, we were only doing minimal publishing to the blog and much of this was written internally by staff at Car Leasing.

Our primary objectives were to be seen by Google as a trustworthy knowledge authority, and to rank for many more longer trail phrases and engage users. We developed a robust SEO strategy (focussing on editorial content around informational search terms with user intent). This involved increasing publishing frequency to 8 blog articles per month. We worked with professional automotive writers to produce authoritative content which we optimised and combined with strong illustrative lifestyle imagery.

Objectives:

- To improve the domain authority for Car Leasing to influence organic rankings

- To drive more organic traffic to the domain & secure more leads

- To create quality and engaging blog content to improve user experience, time on site and returning visits

- To attract high quality backlinks

- To create multi-channel social media content to engage, raise brand awareness, build advocacy and drive traffic to the website

How we did it

We conducted a benchmark analysis of key ‘car leasing’ competitors to understand their behaviour in publishing content. We also looked at the automotive industry generally. The search landscape was highly competitive in terms of articles from online magazines, car manufacturers and dealers as well as leasing companies. Articles from automotive publishers tended to be the most authoritative and up to date.

To compete we needed to demonstrate that Car Leasing was a ‘knowledge authority’ on both vehicle leasing and in the automotive sector. We developed a strong editorial and monthly content strategy based around core themes with an added ‘reactive news’ element.

It was equally important to achieve a ‘stronger voice’ for Car Leasing by publishing more regularly. We also wanted to leverage the blog to fuel other channels with distributed content (social and email) to get the most from this activity and drive traffic from other channels too. We decided that 2 posts a week would be optimal to maintain a regular presence with users and keep it fresh.

We amplified content with email and social media to reach more users. We then targeted audiences with paid social ads on Facebook which also contributed in driving new relevant audiences to the site.

We at Car Leasing have save seen a massive improvement in the volume of business generated from our website thanks to the hard work from Pete, and the rest of the team at Herd. Herd Agency helped to launch our new website early 2018 and have continued to develop and improve the traffic to the site. Many thanks for the hard work and endless energy you all seem to have. Thank you once again.

Julian Pearson, Director, Car Leasing

Project Highlights

1

Platform Migration

We successfully migrated Car Leasing to a new platform working with the web development agency ensuring it was built to best practices for SEO, this included producing optimised landing pages for key manufacturer, model and body style pages.

2

Blog Content Strategy

Regular publishing of high quality informational content to the site, demonstrating the brand and domain as a knowledge authority. This has influenced site visibility and domain authority.

3

Enhanced Navigation

Improvements to the navigation including a drop down menu, better mobile navigation and filters on core landing pages to help users find vehicles faster.

4

User experience

We made significant improvements to the content design throughout the site so steer the user through an onsite journey to answer their questions about leasing and the brand. This included methods of browsing vehicles to make the process faster, more intuitive and also increase the speed of the site.

5

Paid advertising on social media

The search and social landscape for automotive is extremely busy. Through targeting with Facebook Ads we reached new audiences and drove new users to the site to engage and convert.

6

Mobile friendly landing pages

More engaging page content layouts and content were produced to improve both the experience on page and pages visibility in search.