Distinctly

We were tasked with improving the organic visibility of the newly opened Southampton COSMO Restaurant, in order to increase awareness of the branch in the local area.

To do this, we needed to build links to the Southampton page on the COSMO site to help boost local Southampton rankings. Link building to product or service pages is notoriously difficult – however, we thought we would take advantage of COSMO’s varied world buffet menu and organise a local blogger night.

The dual purpose was to drum up discussion online and on social media, as well as – importantly – to build links to the Southampton location page.

To make this work, we needed a hook or reason to host the event. Luckily, we were coming up to both the first birthday of the branch and the launch of the new Christmas menu. It was a joint party!

We had one month to organise, prepare and liaise with the bloggers.

We achieved 10 positive pieces of coverage on the bloggers’ and website owner’s publications with 10 links pointing to the Southampton page.

The sites ranged from food to lifestyle and parenting to local news. As a bonus, we even managed to get one of the Capital South Coast radio morning presenters to talk about her evening at the restaurant on the radio the next day!

The evening was a complete success and there should be more on the way.

Starting with the technical SEO audit, we used a range of premium SEO tools to determine some quick wins including some changes which lead to a vast improvement in site speed and better indexing after analysis of server log files.

In terms of the link building campaign, we looked for alternative ways to do outreach in a very niche industry which is often associated with negative press.

We created a survey, using real consumer data based on the spending and borrowing habits of parents and their children – which allowed us to generate a number of natural ‘followed’ links including a mention in The Sunday Times.

In addition, we leveraged the value of the company’s owner to take part in featured interviews and offer his expertise on the financial industry, on topics such as underwriter practices.

The site has already seen a noticeable jump in rankings, which has led to a better conversion rate and increase in revenue.

We are looking forward to continuing our work with Guarantor Loan Comparison and seeing some further improvements in their organic search over the coming weeks and months.

As well as continuous technical improvements to the site’s structure, we produced “search-led” blog content and engaged in some top-tier link building campaigns which resulted in a huge number of authoritative links, including from over 40 government and university websites.

Combined, the content and link building boosted the client’s levels of expertise, authority and trust (EAT) in the eyes of Google – which then enabled us to rank higher for our main  key search terms.

The other piece in the puzzle was the early adoption of the Google Jobs platform, which to this day sends a large amount of traffic and candidates to the Engage website. By adding Schema Markup to the relevant jobs pages on the site, we encourage Google to pull these jobs through to the platform and the top of the SERP as below. 

Over the 18 months that we have been working with Engage Education, their website has seen consistent growth – with 5 of the last 6 months alone generating new highs in site traffic and conversions. The site has also now grown to target 7 countries.

Distinctly conducted an analysis into the site’s existing blog posts and identified which pieces were competing for featured snippets and which had no visibility at all. This task involved extensive keyword research to highlight terms located just off the first and second page as we believed this would make the most impact. By re-working the meta data, subheadings and some copy, we managed to improve ranking performance for these blog posts.

As visibility grew for the existing set of blog posts, Distinctly devised a content strategy to expand visibility in order to generate higher levels of converting traffic. This involved producing blog titles and a clear framework for the partners to adhere to which ensured every piece of content was well-optimised and well-structured. Before uploading the new content, Distinctly added internal links pointing to its respective service page to leverage keyword performance and to improve the user experience. E.g. if a post was centred around corporate finance, then an internal link to the corporate finance page would be included.

We delivered a strategy which focused on various financial topics which had healthy monthly search volumes and a relatively low keyword difficulty. This meant that the likelihood of ranking for these long-tail queries was quite high.

As our analysis expanded, a large number of blog posts were re-optimised, restructured and improved ranking positions over time.

This activity delivered an increase in organic traffic, form completions and visibility for primary terms.

Where it was impossible to attain clear, accurate data across three separate websites, we used Google Tag Manager to reinstall Google Analytics profiles on them all. This set up tracking for phone calls, emails, form submissions and purchases and minimised the workload for CAMRA’s own developers.

CAMRA’s websites were experiencing self-referral issues when tracking information was lost as customers crossed domains. We resolved these to ensure the original traffic source was retained – as well as resolving a similar problem with purchases, where payment would be attributed to the point of sale rather than the traffic source.

Using Google Data Studio, we created highly bespoke dashboards for all three websites, which would highlight useful data on traffic sources and what users did once on the site. This included users’ locations, their age and gender and what content they consumed most frequently. 

Having compiled a list of target publications and considering the type of content they were likely to feature, we decided to commission a survey. 

Surveys are a highly effective way of establishing authority and relevance in an industry by creating unique, linkable data that nobody has seen before – driving the news rather than following it.

We collated the results and produced an in-depth written analysis of our research which would be placed on Cheeky Munkey’s website. The most important parts were written into a press release which was then delivered to our target websites and publications.

Our survey experienced impressively widespread coverage, generating over 60 (and counting) links and coverage in top recruitment and HR publications, magazines and websites. 

Among the highest-profile results were front page coverage on Recruiting Times and HR News. It’s this kind of top-tier coverage that best demonstrates what survey-based content can do – achieving the kind of exposure that would be worth thousands of pounds in advertising costs, simply by approaching them with something unusual.

Cheeky Munkey were so pleased with the results that they commissioned a second survey – The Over-35s in the Workplace Survey. We used the same methods to promote this and it has generated similar levels of exposure since its publication earlier this year.

The survey page on Cheeky Munkey’s website is not the only one to have seen traffic soar – they are now ranking #1 for their chosen target query by adding internal links to the service page they wanted to promote.