Car Leasing
SEO migration & content strategy to drive organic search authority
- +127% Growth in organic traffic year-on-year
- +263% Increase in ranking keywords
- +128% Growth in vehicle lease quote leads year-on-year
- +257% Domain Authority (DA) increase
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 redesign and 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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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 tail phrases and engage users.
We developed a robust SEO strategy, focusing on editorial content around informational search terms with user intent. This involved increasing publishing frequency to eight blog articles per month.
We worked with professional automotive writers to produce authoritative content which we optimised and combined with strong illustrative lifestyle imagery.
Key objectives
- To improve the domain authority for Car Leasing to influence organic rankings
- To drive more organic traffic to the domain and 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 two 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.
Project highlights
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.
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.
Improvements to the navigation including a drop-down menu, better mobile navigation and filters on core landing pages to help users find vehicles faster.
We made significant improvements to the content design throughout the site to steer the user through an onsite journey and 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.
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.
More engaging page content layouts and content were produced to improve both the experience on-page and pages' visibility in search.
