|
Brief
In March 2008 Europcar and bigmouthmedia partnered to create a search engine optimization campaign aimed at increasing the visibility of Europcar in all major search engines to reach a qualified audience. Bigmouthmedia’s experience and international presence, with 11 offices in 9 countries, made it the perfect fit for Europcar’s multi-country, multi-language campaign.
The cross-border campaign was rolled out in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, the United States, and the UK with a domestic campaign following in Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK. The main objectives were:
1. To generate more business from cross-border rentals (i.e. a rental where the customer’s country of residence differs from the country where the vehicle will be picked up).
2. To increase the number of domestic vehicle rentals (i.e. a rental where the customer’s country of residence is the same as the country where the vehicle will be picked up), specifically in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.
Strategy
Europcar’s complex legacy systems challenged the Europcar and bigmouthmedia teams. Delivering a solution that could be launched in short timeframe but also provided strong business results required the teams to take a truly innovative approach.
Bigmouthmedia initially focused on getting the foundations in place and minimising the impact of technical restrictions. To do so, bigmouthmedia put together a “back to basics” strategy using the following elements, starting with a highly strategic, tiered approach to keywords, backed up by a content-driven link building strategy and a number of tailor-made tools.
Execution
In the campaign, keywords were tiered and prioritised based on different keyword scale and tiers depending on the priority. The priority was decided according to the business needs of Europcar and the potential traffic they were likely to generate. In total, approximately 2,000 keywords were targeted in each country. This exceptionally high amount of keywords covered by the campaign is explained by the aim to drive cross-border rentals, as well as domestic business in the case of Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK.
With regards to the link building strategy, as well as directory submissions bigmouthmedia distributed a selection of Europcar’s press releases to online PR hubs and wrote articles on the car rental sector which were then published online. Crucially, the articles and press releases contained anchor text which linked back to the most appropriate page in the Europcar site. This increased Europcar’s SEO rankings in search engines for the targeted keywords. Bigmouthmedia also advised Europcar on optimising and updating Europcar’s location pages, designed to maximise search engine visibility and drive additional bookings from location specific key phrases such as “car hire in London”. The pages, which were re-designed with bigmouthmedia’s recommendations now integrate the Google Maps API and contain relevant, high-quality copy that is attractive to both search engines and final users.
Tracking the trends and results for 2,000 words per country was also required to measure the success of the campaign. To make sure that the figures were relevant for Europcar, bigmouthmedia designed a ‘dashboard’ style of reporting with three distinct data sections: actions completed, impact of these actions and future strategy. This intuitive reporting tool presented the massive data input collected in a clear and easy to understand manner.
Another element that bigmouthmedia tailored to the needs of the client was the Europcar Search Newsletter, which is sent once a month to Europcar’s online marketing team. The newsletter highlights search engine rankings, updates Europcar team members on the latest status of the campaign and includes key market news that may affect Europcar search engine visibility. The purpose of the newsletter, to inform and to educate, was achieved by presenting relevant data in an attractive format.
From an operational perspective, it was decided early on that the campaign would be managed by bigmouthmedia from the UK. Bigmouthmedia’s local offices contributed with link building, metadata and localization tasks for their respective countries, as well as with market-related input and suggestions for keyword targets. This model facilitated the identification of opportunities and communication between business units. In addition to the local teams, bigmouthmedia’s travel strategy team also contributed to the campaign, providing travel-specific trends and insights that helped tailor SEO efforts to the specific market segment.
Results
The successful results of the campaign were quickly noticeable and surpassed initial expectations. As a direct result of the SEO campaign, total combined organic traffic to Europcar sites increased substantially, with core markets (Germany, Italy, Spain, US and UK) registering positive growth in both traffic and revenue. The campaign objectives were fulfilled, with particularly significant increases for www.europcar.com and www.europcar.pt. The campaign also achieved much improved YOY rankings for the super generic keyword “car hire” in several countries: as an example, in Spain “coches de alquiler” went from a previous position outside Google’s top 50 to position 1.
|