The Client
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 include motor trade, 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 links was set as well as 1500 visits to the asset.
The Strategy
A recent Freedom of Information request submitted by The Metro revealed that seats on seven out of eleven Tube lines in London are never shampooed. The general cleanliness of our capital is often discussed, because of this, we 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.
We presented the findings in a way which shocked and educated readers, the aim was to create something that generated engagement on Staveley Head’s site and drive 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 the exclusive on the Daily Mail, Staveley Head achieved 96 pieces of press/media coverage in just 9 days.
Nearly every national publication online covered the story and linked back to the interactive asset on the Staveley Head 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 over 2 million views in the space of 24 hours
The Results – SEO Value
After just one month, we 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 4 minutes and 35 seconds, which is triple the site average.
In terms of organic visibility, Staveley Head’s traffic index has jumped from 7.05% to 8.68% 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, we track over 1,200 keywords relevant to their product.
Traffic index in the Taxi market has jumped from 16.98% to 21.66% and Motor Trade is at a record high 17.2% traffic index, up from 13.2% in April.
Prior to the campaign going live, we had 63 keywords ranking in positions 1-3. However, since the launch we now have 111 keywords in positions 1-3 and we only expect this to increase.
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.”