Enterprise SEO strategy - driving revenue & rankings for automotive giant, Motorpoint

Motorpoint

The challenge

Motorpoint is one of the UK’s leading car supermarkets with 19 stores across the UK selling nearly new and used vehicles.

Motorpoint approached Herd as they were looking for an SEO expert agency to grow organic visibility of their stores nationwide and develop a ranking tool to help them monitor performance from one user-friendly dashboard. Work began with the development of a robust SEO strategy to improve organic visibility in search engines, drive more traffic, and rev up revenue across the business.

This resonates with Herd’s mission – Growing Digital Giants from the brands that we partner with. This is the very reason that Motorpoint have chosen to work with Herd as their performance marketing partner.

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Results

A selection of key statistics from this project:

+19% Organic traffic growth YoY
30k+ Keywords monitored across 20 search engines
200 Hours saved in annual reporting
140+ High authority links from first campaign
+20% Growth in organic visibility

Our approach

Motorpoint saw that their organic traffic had remained static for some time. Whilst not declining, it was clear that there was room to accelerate growth through this channel.

The project involved a comprehensive review of their current link profile, including competitor analysis and providing recommendations for improving the site’s overall health; identifying opportunities to build links that would drive SEO performance across the UK branch landscape; an extensive keyword research project to create a keyword universe of over 20k target informational and commercial keywords; changes to on-page content across the site, and creating a bespoke keyword ranking tool to allow for internal performance monitoring at scale.

Key Objectives

Herd were appointed to help the brand adhere to best practice, grow local search presence, and support organic growth within the highly competitive used vehicle sales sector. Key objectives included:

Undertake a comprehensive SEO & content audit, benchmarking performance against top competitors and provide actionable recommendations to accelerate growth
Deliver a robust SEO strategy to grow organic visibility of their stores nationwide
Develop an SEO ranking tool to enable Motorpoint to monitor and analyse performance in search results at scale both locally and nationwide

How we did it

Extensive keyword research – We created a keyword universe of 20k target keywords considering the full spectrum of terms Motorpoint should be ranking for across both commercial and informational intent. This was fundamental in setting a benchmark for SEO, and to inform the strategic direction going forwards in optimising and maximising organic visibility potential.

Backlink audit and gap analysis – We conducted a comprehensive manual audit of Motorpoint's backlink profile, assessing legitimacy of links, and providing actionable recommendations for each of the links and domains reviewed. This resulted in removal of detrimental links which do not conform to best practice, and delivery of link gap analysis outlining shortcomings vs. the top 5 competitor backlink profiles.

Bespoke ranking tool – We designed and created a robust, flexible ranking tool to provide numerous levels of SEO rank tracking, forming the bedrock of SEO performance monitoring and strategic insights, including a clear picture of the Motorpoint organic landscape. The tool needed to include 20k keywords across the Motorpoint keyword universe, tracked once monthly for Google UK, Mobile, 2k weekly tracked keywords and 200 keywords across 20 local searches (e.g. Google UK, Derby) to monitor specific store performance.

The data provided was curated into a live, fully customisable, and user-friendly dashboard system to facilitate Motorpoint’s internal monthly branch performance monitoring and analysis purposes.

On-site improvements – We used the keyword and data audit insights to improve on-page content including the creation of new make and model pages, a new blog layout, and a link clean-up, with impressive results.

We are impressed by the outstanding results driven by Herd throughout our SEO project journey so far. Our partnership with Herd continues to grow stronger and we look forward to driving more traffic and revenue as a result. Huge thanks from all the Team at Motorpoint.

Alex Howland, Digital Marketing Director, Motorpoint

Project Highlights

1

Keyword universe development

Finding 20k target keywords across the automotive sector for commercial and informational search intent. This would inform our SEO strategy to optimise for the right terms and maximise organic visibility opportunity.

2

PLP content optimisation

By using the data available, we prioritised our content creation efforts in the areas where we could add most value, securing the maximum number of page 1 listings for our make and model listing pages.

3

Backlink audit & gap analysis

Our comprehensive link profile audit, clean up and gap analysis resulted in significant improvements for Motorpoint's backlink profile, and domain authority.

This facilitated 140+ new links from relevant, authoritative sources from our first PR campaign alone.

4

Crawl performance improvements

Through our daily performance checks, we were able to discover areas of the site which were being under-discovered by crawlers.

It was then essential that we included the right signals such as internal links to orphaned pages, and fixing broken links to drive organic search visibility.

5

Informational content optimisation

Through our keyword research and competitor analysis, we determined that there were several subject areas where fresh content should be created to secure rankings for these terms.

Using Motorpoint's expertise, we then optimised this new content to have the most impact within search engines.

6

SEO ranking tool

Our bespoke ranking tool allows Motorpoint to have a clear picture of their organic visibility in a user friendly dashboard, facilitating performance monitoring at scale across all 19 UK stores.

7

Local business search optimisation

Optimising Google Business Profiles (GBP) to capture local search visibility for Motorpoint's brick-and-mortar stores.

We also syndicated optimised GBP stores to top local directories, reinforcing trust and local search signals.