Transforming SEO Performance Through Content And Technical SEO Expertise
Challenge
After a penalty in 2012, InsureandGo’s SEO was heavily impacted. Prior to this, the travel insurance company had been a forerunner in the industry in terms of search, thereafter ROAST were appointed to turn around their SEO after the negative impact of the penalty.
Innovation
InsureandGo came to ROAST with the search specific challenge of appearing on page 1 for their main terms. Unfortunately, this target was not void of obstacles, however ROAST was eager to embrace the challenge. Following this recent history of poor rankings, clearly a bespoke and strategic campaign was imperative, and ROAST needed to think outside the box. The strategy that was put into place revolved around exploring niche areas of focus in a wide and varied market place.
By gathering in depth insights and market research, the ROAST team found that often people were driven to destinations by the activities that were available in them, for instance scuba diving, cycling, hiking, skiing, etc. Inspired by this insight, we deployed social listening and audience research to identify online communities with an appetite for these activities. We chose to focus on these niche groups of people; where passion is involved, engagement and conversion rates are higher. We then identified our specific target groups within our generic audience.
One big challenge we came up against was that online audiences are naturally less likely to engage with an insurance brand for leisure and travel articles. To remove this barrier, we suggested breaking away from the corporate brand identity and build an unbranded microsite to host the content. Through technical optimisation, the microsite was linked to InsureandGo’s website, and was responsible for driving rankings. By effectively creating an online travel magazine, which targeted niche audiences, the microsite became an online destination of choice.
Through the creation of a unique SEO-focused campaign generated interest and engagement within these communities. Thereafter we were able to create positive ranking signals, which in turn increased InsureandGo’s search visibility. This led to a boost on all lower-level search queries related to our campaigns which in turn drove up overall rankings for InsureandGo in major, very competitive, generic categories.
Results
The partnership resulted in a:
- 22% increase in YoY overall organic traffic
- 19% increase in YoY organic transactions
- 16% increase in YoY organic revenue
- 283% increase in YoY search visibility
- and a 310k estimated coverage views.
Testimonial
“ROAST are an efficient and easy to work with agency that are always looking to deliver on the campaigns they conduct. Their market intelligence and innovative nature meant we were able to access highly engaged, niche audiences within the saturated insurance sector, driving ranking performance up dramatically for InsureandGo in very competitive categories.” Simon Everett, Head of Marketing at InsureandGo