Our Work Services Written By Us About Contact Virgin Experience Days Using SEO to keep VED ahead of the game 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. Results 24% increase in organic sessions year-on-year 19% increase in non-brand keyword impressions year-on-year 566% increase in ‘Christmas Gifting’ keywords in top 3 results (3 to 20) year-on-year Insights Eight-step PPC checklist for Black Friday & Cyber Monday READ MORE Contact Are you ready to make a digital step-change? 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. GET IN TOUCH About Our Work Written By Us Our Services Join Us Home +44 1273 827700 results@icrossing.co.uk Terms & Conditions Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Cookie Settings Copyright © 2021 / iCrossing UK Ltd, a Hearst Company / Registered Company No. 3955760. iCrossing and third parties use cookies and similar technologies (“Cookies”) on this site. Some Cookies are necessary to make this site and our content available to you. Other Cookies analyse and measure audience and traffic. Cookies are also used by us and third parties such as advertisers, ad-tech providers and others (“Vendors”) to develop and serve ads more relevant to your interests based on your consent or our legitimate interests. For a list of Vendors that can set Cookies on your device or browser when you interact with this site and the purposes for which Cookies are set by Vendors and us, click Learn More below. From time to time we may add or remove Vendors and/or Cookies. You can adjust your preferences including your right to object where legitimate interest is used, or withdraw your consent to certain Cookies at any time. We process personal data obtained through the use of Cookies (such as a cookie identifier and/or IP address) for the purposes described in the Privacy Notice and Cookies Policy published on the site. To consent to the use of Cookies and proceed to the site, click Accept below. ACCEPT LEARN MORE