A well-known national car brand wanted to increase their market-share, from entry-level cars to SUV’s to commercial vans.
Website type: B2B, B2C, Ecommerce
Industry: Automotive
CMS: Custom built
Pages: 3300+
The Challenge
Due to Covid, lockdown and economic downturn, search demand for car related searches took a sharp decline over April & May and were slow to recover. This meant that it would be challenging to increase the number of users visiting their website through organic search while there are essentially fewer people searching for this.
The challenge was to increase both branded and non-branded visibility and organic sessions through creating a better understanding of the site by search engines, mainly Google.
The Approach
The following summarises the main actions taken in order to increase Google’s understanding of the site and, in effect, increase organic traffic to the site:
- Unique page titles for all pages targeting search terms
- Strategic footer links targeting highly competitive search terms
- Use of local SEO (Google My Business) in creating a better understanding of the dealership pages
The Data
Various tactics were implemented to increase the site’s visibility for car categories such as SUV, Sedan, etc. The below shows the effect of a footer optimised for strategic keywords that fall into place with what Users expect to see and would find useful in a footer.
The results show a considerable improvement after a 6 month period.
The below shows a six month visibility graph of the client against its top competitors for non-branded search phrases. After initial implementation, the client shows more visibility on average.
The client is the green line in the below graph:
The results
Google’s understanding of the website drastically increased, resulting in the site seeing an increase in visibility in the search results, particularly for branded searches. The site also saw an increase in rankings for highly competitive search terms SUV, hatchback and sedan.
This increase in rankings resulted in the following increases in organic traffic to the site year on year:
195% YoY increase in organic sessions to vehicle pages (both pre-owned & new)
71% YoY increase in organic sessions to dealership pages
83% YoY increase in total organic sessions
From the results of the SEO plus digital awareness ad campaigns, and working alongside their external development and in-house marketing team, this brand achieved their goal of increasing marketshare in the local market, and became the second most popular car in South Africa for a time.
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