High Competition in the SERPS
Our client provides quote comparisons for business and domestic utilities, providing excellent potential savings. With their services, they are able to support both SMEs, large businesses, and public sectors. They’ve won multiple awards and have a fantastic, customer-oriented delivery. However, their overall business excellence wasn’t translating to their performance in the SERPs…
When it came to keyword rankings, this client was facing a particularly competitive landscape. As well as dealing with direct business competitors in the SERPs, their ranking issue had an additional challenge in the form of informative bodies. When informative bodies rank well, it is often because they have a lot of long-form, well-researched content that has gained a lot of external links due to its high quality. The size and status of these sites mean that they provide a real challenge for those who face them in the SERPS.
Click Intelligence’s Objective
Click Intelligence was approached to support our client’s performance in the SERPs relating to ‘Business Water’ and their ability to provide the best quotes for commercial water bills. This is a core business focus that they felt wasn’t getting the traction it needed in the search engines.
Click Intelligence’s main objective was to: Improve visibility in the SERPs by increasing keyword rankings.
The Click Intelligence team began with a thorough audit and in-depth competitor analysis. With these insights, we were able to create a data-driven, bespoke strategy.
The Strategy for SEO Success
The technical component of our audit confirmed that the site was well built for success in the search engines. We determined that the client’s backlink profile was limiting their visibility for essential keywords. As a result, a full link building campaign was needed to help improve rankings.
A dual approach was taken to ensure the client’s backlink profile was increased in a way that improved brand awareness and helped them combat all types of competitors, focusing on attracting high-quality links with strong domains. During our outreach, we ensured we were approaching only the best sites, and were also targeting rare links, such as key news sites. A strong backlink profile demonstrates to search engines that other users trust this information enough to credit on their own sites. To Google, the backlinks’ granted act is an additional seal of approval regarding quality. However, the competitor analysis conducted showed that our client had some unusual competitors in the SERPs…
Rather than just typical business competitors in their sector, our clients also competed for top spots in the SERPs with informative governing bodies. As a result, we needed to be creative in our approach to link building to ensure that we were effectively growing high-quality links.
We knew that to compete for the client’s focus keywords, a dual approach was needed, to include both Blogger Outreach and Resource Link building. Blogger Outreach is a type of influencer marketing that enables you to capture new customers within your niche. This process involves creating relevant, unique content suitable for external blogs relevant to the client’s specific sector, and in turn, will help grow organic traffic. Resource Link Building is rather a technique that helps websites to build backlinks from pages that have curated lists of links to external websites. The nature of this process involves creating content that provides in-depth research into a relevant topic, with a full list of additional resource URLs. Factually strong content sourced from trusted locations can offer huge long-term rewards.
Our strategic approach to resource link building couldn’t be too overly commercial. We debated the pros and cons of water supplier look-up tools or water bill estimates, but we determined that to attract links from top quality sites (such as gov. sites), our approach couldn’t be too commercial, as these sites rarely link to this kind of content. We needed to ensure the content was fit for the long-term to attract the right quality and appeal to webmasters. So, instead, we opted to conduct research on and create a dedicated landing page for content surrounding water wastage, with an in-depth focus on wastage in the UK.
The piece is full of reputable data and statistics, explores what water wastage is, and assesses the environmental and economic impact of wasting water. This creates a fantastic, linkable resource. Due to market trends, everyone needs to show they’re being more environmentally aware. As well as doing this, this piece of content also communicates the financial impact of water waste. Overall, the page can help site users improve their business’s environmental approach and protect revenue. In addition to our link building campaign, we also conducted optimisation on key landing pages. This involved improving:
- Keyword placement within the copy
- Metadata
- H1s & H2s
- Internal linking.
Keyword Movements
The combination of our dual approach link building campaign and our on-page optimisation generated in achieving our objective and moving high-priority keywords up the SERPs.
Keyword Positions
Further to this, our client has been so happy that we are now working on improving other priority keywords and expanding visibility for secondary keywords.
