London Under the Microscope
Staveley Head is one of the most respected providers of insurance products to businesses and individuals in the UK. Since founding in 1991, they have steadily grown in both size and reputation, expanding their product range from car and home insurance to business, courier, and taxi insurance.
The Challenge
Staveley Head saw a decline in rankings for the term ‘Taxi’ following the Phantom update in February/March 2017. Because of this, Edit were challenged to put together a strategy to improve overall search rankings, specifically focusing on generating engagement and links around their taxi and Uber insurance offering.
The challenge was to create a story that appealed to the media and would produce nationwide press coverage and backlinks, and also attract new and unique visitors to the site. The focus was on generating high-quality (rather than high-quantity) backlinks. A KPI of 15-20 high quality inks was set as well as 1500 visits to the asset.
A recent Freedom of Information request submitted by The Metro revealed that seats on seven out of the eleven Tube lines in London are never shampooed. The general cleanliness of our capital is often discussed, because of this, Edit wanted to see which is the cleanest form of transport – the Tube lines on the Underground, taxis/Uber, or London buses?
The London Metropolitan University supported the study, taking a total of 80 swabs across the capital. The team tested handrails, seats, and walls and took their findings back to the lab to study the results.
The Findings
One hundred and twenty-one different types of bacteria and mould were found upon public transport in London. The Victoria Line was revealed as the dirtiest line of all, containing potentially life-threatening bacteria, such as Klebsiella Pneumoniae and E.coli.
The Metropolitan Line came out as the cleanest line on the Underground, but it was London buses that were found to be the cleanest form of public transport in London.
Edit presented the findings in a way which shocked and educated readers, with the aim was to create something that generated engagement on Staveley Head’s site and drove traffic through interactivity.
To meet these requirements, we created London Under the Microscope: an interactive asset which allows users to virtually explore the Tube lines, taxis, and London buses using UV through the use of a ‘UV’ mode within the asset. This adds a dimension of interactivity as users can find the bacteria, see what levels of bacteria were present, and find out what harm these bacteria could cause if the user were to come into contact with them.
The Results
Links/Coverage:
Following the launch of an exclusive story with The Daily Mail, Staveley Head achieved a further 143 pieces of press/media coverage across national and international media driving nearly 20,000 people to the asset on site and 2.6 million shares on the BBC alone.
The story spread the internet and went viral within just five days resulting in every national publication online covering the story and many linking back to the interactive asset on Staveley Head’s site.
Wired magazine, The Independent, International Business Times, Yahoo, the BBC, and ITV News are just some of the publications that picked up the campaign.
The video on the BBC achieved two million views in the space of 24 hours.
A month after launching the campaign, we saw a sudden increase in brand mentions for Staveley Head. The campaign started to spread again achieving an extra 25 pieces of media coverage. Following our campaign, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, released a statement promising to launch a clean-up operation within the Underground in London. He promised, “Cleaning of the London Underground will be stepped up each night over the summer to remove metal particles, dust, oil and grease from about 50 stations and five tunnels.”
SEO Value:
After just one month, Edit have already seen an impact upon the overall visibility for the Staveley Head website. So far:
- 18,800 people have interacted with our asset on Staveley Head’s website, and 17,221 were unique (and therefore new) visitors to the site
- The average time spent on site was four minutes 35 seconds, which is triple the site average
- In terms of organic visibility, Staveley Head’s traffic index has jumped from 7.05 per cent to 8.68 per cent and we’ve seen a good boost in the Taxi market. Traffic index is a metric used to understand the percentage of maximum potential traffic the brand ‘owns’, based on the keyword set being tracked. For Staveley Head, Edit track over 1,200 keywords relevant to their product
- Traffic index in the Taxi market has jumped from 16.98 per cent to 21.66 per cent and Motor Trade is at a record high 17.2 per cent traffic index, up from 13.2 per cent in April
- Prior to the campaign going live, Edit had 63 keywords ranking in positions 1-3. However, since the launch they now have 111 keywords in positions 1-3 and they only expect this to increase.