Focused long tail content strategy results in 655% increase in traffic
Building a new audience through strategic content
The Meteorological Office or Met Office is the UK’s national weather service. They provide critical meteorological services and world-leading climate science, helping people make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.
Since their foundation in 1854, the Met Office has pioneered the science of meteorology and its application. To this day, they continue to push the boundaries of science and technology, to meet the demands of today and the future.
The challenge
How do you optimise content effectively to deal with Google’s own card results?
This is a challenge faced by many of our clients yet hits those hardest who are already operating in highly competitive verticals. The Met Office – the UK’s national weather service – faces competition from sites like the BBC and Accuweather for key forecast affiliated queries and all of these brands are aiming to be the search result that appears in Google’s Weather Box:
With such stiff competition in the head tail, the Met Office needed a strategic solution to attract new users. Having worked with them on a number of projects aimed at broadening their audience base – including a social insights project that drew thousands more followers to the brand – we were keen to maintain our successful streak.
The solution
Rather than simply relying on the quality of their headline weather forecast information, we advised the Met Office to adopt a long tail content strategy to attract a wider base of people looking for more specific information. By focusing in on long tail search terms, assessing query demand and developing content around these themes, we predicted that a broader swathe of visitors would be attracted to the site. Building out a wide content base would also increase the chance of triggering answer box visibility and work to strengthen their domain overall.
We arrived at these content recommendations by undertaking:
- Keyword research & content mapping
- Audience profiling
- Content strategy
Areas of the site where the most gains could be found included ‘Holiday weather’ so we worked with the Met Office to implement content recommendations.
Met Office Case Study
Download PDF
The results
While there’s still a long way to go to action out content recommendations, the first three months of the launched campaign yielded a 655% traffic increase compared to the previous year.
During the same period, the Met Office saw an 781% increase in new users and 17% uplift in new sessions.