Change …

After 10 years hard work, Virgin Experience Days (VED)’s website was well-optimised for experience day keywords. As a result, there were no quick wins to boost visibility and traffic for the peak retail period in Q4. With the busiest time for retail around the corner, we needed to step-change our SEO strategy to increase non-brand traffic and visibility.

Made Simple

Our Dynamic Search Ad activity showed a continued shift towards long-tail searches, with further head-term analysis confirming consumers are becoming savvier – using long-tail searches to find exactly what they want.

With experiences such a competitive sector, we needed to react to this change in search behaviour before our rivals did. Our strategy was simple: focus purely on increasing the breadth of keywords we ranked for and creating the most relevant content.

Taking stock and utilising social listening

We carried out an n-gram analysis through PPC search queries to understand which long-tail searches performed best and drive our new content and meta data optimisation. We identified pages in VED’s navigation that could serve specific searches; indexing them and blocking others to reserve crawl budget.

We carried out an n-gram analysis through PPC search queries to understand which long-tail searches performed best and drive our new content and meta data optimisation. We identified pages in VED’s navigation that could serve specific searches; indexing them and blocking others to reserve crawl budget.

Previous work on tech product launches gave us the know-how to get our Black Friday and Christmas Gifts categories indexed quickly and ranking well. We used insights from social listening to identify trends to serve through new landing pages (a ‘gin experiences’ page drove 20k traffic YOY in Q4 alone). And worked with VED to create a gift finder that targeted a brand-new set of keywords based on interests, including ‘gifts for foodies’ and ‘gifts for petrol heads’.

We tested core Christmas Gifting category links to the top-level navigation, to make sure authority was flowing from the home page to the most important URLs (as well as from historical blog pages with inbound links).

And, knowing we’d never be able to rank where the intent was to find the best Black Friday deals, identified top-ranking publications and passed these over to the VED PR team and our own affiliate experts to pick up through partnerships.

We believe that moving too slowly in digital is the biggest risk your business faces. If you are ready to move faster in digital, we are here to help.