Increasing Peugeot's backlinks, resulting in a 93.6% rise in non-brand organic search traffic, and 10,000 more organic keywords generating traffic.
BRIEF: Increase traffic, increase backlinks, increase test drive conversions
TARGETS: Increase links back to Peugeot's website to over 500,000, increase rankings for non-brand terms
OUTCOME: Backlinks increased past 500,000, 93.6% rise in non-brand organic search traffic, 10,000 more organic keywords generating traffic
Peugeot is a massive international automotive brand, with a head office based in Paris, which develops and hosts the brand’s individual country websites. The UK head office is based in Coventry and looks after www.peugeot.co.uk. Peugeot approached ClickThrough Marketing in 2009, to help increase traffic to its website, build links to the site, and improve test drive conversions.
Compared to competitors, Peugeot’s backlinks were relatively thin on the ground. In terms of search, Peugeot wasn’t ranking for a host of non-brand terms, such as ‘family cars’, and, once visitors did arrive at their website, many weren’t converting into test drive bookings, brochure requests or visits to their local dealer. Peugeot wanted optimisation for its own brand terms, too.
We devised a multi-pronged strategy, beginning with keyword research to help improve search rankings. We focused on brand and non-brand keywords, with optimisation for new non-brand search terms, such as ‘new car’, ‘family cars’, ‘electric cars’ and ‘seven seater cars’.
Visits from non-brand, organic search traffic have risen by 93.6%, as of January 2012. The number of organic keywords generating traffic to Peugeot has risen by 32.7% in January 2012 compared to January 2011. Peugeot has seen a 1,476% increase in visits based on ‘electric’ search terms, a 50% rise in traffic from ‘family’ search terms, a 60% rise on ‘new’ search terms and a 1,847% rise on ‘new car deals’ searches. At the start of 2011, Peugeot ranked 35th for ‘low emissions cars’ – they are now on the first page of Google results. Peugeot also now ranks in the top ten for search terms including ‘electric cars’, ‘fuel efficient cars’, ‘family cars’ and ‘city cars’.
In January 2012, we met a Key Performance Indicator for increasing the total number of links back to Peugeot.co.uk to 500,000. We’ve also helped Peugeot increase their unique domain links, from 13,000 to 18,500. As a result, visits to the site have increased by 15% year-on-year for 2010/11.
“As an international brand and a household name in the UK, we constantly want to take advantage of any new online opportunities, and SEO is one such opportunity, especially for non-brand search terms. With the Peugeot brand changing its focus in recent years, we’ve worked closely with ClickThrough, and they’ve taken the time to really understand our brand, and our ever-expanding product range. The team devises strategies to reflect our priorities throughout the year – and we’ve seen our rankings rise as a result. ClickThrough has also worked really hard to generate more backlinks to our site, and to advise us on improving content, and we’ve been really impressed at just how quickly the team met our various targets.”
Zoë Macleay
Digital Content Manager, Peugeot UK