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Brief
The Angel Investment Network (AIN) is a global community of entrepreneurs, start-ups and investors. Already aware that search could make or break a new business’ foray into the online space, AIN had been running paid search since 2005. Reform was appointed in late 2008 to expand its search marketing activities into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and to maximise its efficiencies in PPC as a secondary objective.
Strategy
Across most international territories, the AIN brand was hard to find in the natural search results, primarily because their servers were located in the US. There was however a growing response to the proposition via PPC, through which members were signing up and succeeding in finding investment opportunities. So, the primary objective was to broaden the visibility of the brand globally via search, and think outside the box in terms of targeting new audiences.
Execution
Reform developed a search engine optimisation strategy that would enable the brand to develop a presence beyond niche terms, and that would enable AIN to move into, and become a key player in the business investment, angel investment and entrepreneur sectors - across a range of industries. Reform also led a content strategy focussed upon designing search-friendly, relevant content and generating coverage by writing customised articles on the investment market, many of which were translated for use in multiple languages.
Alongside this, Reform refined the client’s PPC campaigns, building more targeted landing pages to try and increase conversions on the site, whilst lowering the cost per conversion.
Results
Despite the backdrop of the recession, Reform’s SEO programme drove a 100% increase in natural search traffic, even as news sources around the world cited a sharp decline in interest in start-up businesses and angel investment. AIN rose to the top of search rankings, achieving the #1 ranking position for terms including “angel investors” “business investors” “angel investment” “business entrepreneurs” and “business investment”, not only in the UK, but across markets around the world.
Furthermore, AIN reached the first page of rankings in Google for top level terms in multiple languages, including French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. The content strategy that we put in place improved the site’s link strength and AIN came to be cited as a useful source of information by the media.
The enhancements to the PPC campaign led to an increase in the volume of conversions by up to 50% on some of the AIN sites, while cost per conversion fell by a similar proportion.
Overall, Reform established, and now maintain a strong natural search presence for AIN in Australia, NZ, Ireland, South Africa, USA, France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and other markets around the world.
Reform continues to identify proactive search strategies to increase the client’s ROI from this marketing channel across all target markets, and to support the client’s in-house team in the effective delivery of the PPC campaigns.
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