Motorpoint
Enterprise SEO strategy to drive revenue & rankings for automotive giant, Motorpoint
- +19% Organic traffic growth year-on-year
- 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
Project overview
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
The brief
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
- Undertake a comprehensive SEO and 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 the removal of detrimental links which do not conform to best practice, and delivery of link gap analysis outlining shortcomings versus the top five 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.
Project highlights
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
