giffgaff is one of the UK’s leading mobile networks, with a truly unique offering that empowers its members more than any other. Working with them for over three years, starting with a short-term 3-month project in 2016, developing into a fully integrated SEO campaign that focused on increasing organic traffic and awareness of the mobile handset division.
Our approach
In a highly competitive sector, a traditional approach to SEO would take a number of months to come to fruition. Therefore, we developed a strategy that utilised not only the site’s equity but also its passionate customer base and internal resources, to deliver a more efficient campaign.
We achieved this by splitting our strategy into two stages:
- Stage one – develop a number of training and consultation sessions with multiple departments within giffgaff. We worked with the brand, development, content and creative teams to ensure they had a complete understanding of what needed to be achieved and why. We also focused on resolving some of the site’s most critical technical issues, partnering with the development team and product owners to deliver a series of recommendations prioritised by potential impact and difficulty. Additionally, we also optimised all primary organic pages to target keywords, working in tandem with the PPC and CRO teams to ensure all content focused on maximising relevancy as well as conversions. This approach led to a new template being developed, which resulted in all-new handset pages being created ‘SEO first’
- Stage two – with the foundations built we then began developing the outreach campaigns. Though these were primarily focused on acquiring links, we wanted to utilise giffgaff’s members to help improve responses. We have currently developed four campaigns since the first stage was complete – all of which have been successful in acquiring external links from highly reputable news portals, blogs and commercial sites
The results
Though it’s still too early to measure the direct impact of this activity, due to the highly competitive sector, we have been successful in the following areas:
- Develop a ‘passion for SEO’ within all departments of the client, through training and an increased understanding of what is needed and why, which has helped to ensure our requests are prioritised effectively
- Reduced reliance upon other third parties, as technical SEO ability, content and creative have been brought in-house due to increased knowledge, this has resulted in saving over £250,000 per year
- Increased organic rankings (averaging top 3 positions) across all top-tier mobile handsets like the iPhone and Galaxy variants
- YoY increases in organic traffic across the website, whilst retaining the same conversion rate levels