544% increase in organic traffic
Targeted approach drives almost half a million new organic visitors to world’s largest commercial pest control company.
The world’s largest commercial pest control specialist with over 90 years of experience, Rentokil spans over 70 countries and protect individuals, families, and businesses from pest-borne disease and the risks of poor hygiene.
The challenge
Rentokil is the market leader for pest control and an authority on both dealing with removing pests and ensuring high standards of food safety. Despite their quality content, they were losing valuable site visibility and traffic to competitors for rodent and food safety-related search terms.
Analysis showed that Rentokil were trailing behind competitors when it came to links from high quality domains for these key sections of the site and that a laser-focused link building approach would be required to halt the decline.
The solution
Our first step was to create an engaging piece of content around rodent control that publishers would feel compelled to share – not an easy task! Our initial content research found that rats could produce half a billion descendants in just three years – now that’s a hook! Through the Rise of the Rats campaign, we wanted to bring this statistic to life in a way that illustrated the sheer scale of this rapid population growth, so we created a simple yet eye opening graphic that does exactly that!
Representing the increasing rat population through the years was not an easy task – we jump from two rats in the first slide to 402,508,800 in the last one!
Solving that problem required some experimental prototyping. Given the huge numbers, our first preference was to generate the rats programmatically to avoid manually placing such a large number. However, prototyping uncovered major performance issues with rendering those elements, so we had to pivot to static images.
The client’s simple colour palette played in our favour and we used just a few tints of grey for the rats and the red for the timeline navigation. Using a strong accent colour for the interactive part helped capture the user’s eye, keeping the visuals clear and fitting well with the limitations of the GIF format.
Our outreach further strengthened Rentokil’s position as an authority in the niche with insightful comments from General Technical Manager Dr. Andy Brigham. This made sure that alongside coverage on news and interest sites like Daily Mail, Mother Jones and New Republic, the piece also gained recognition in quality industry publications such as QSR Magazine, PCT online and Pest Management Professional, thereby reaching both B2C and B2B audiences with these shocking stats.
Our second targeted growth campaign was centred around the devastating impact product recalls can have in the food industry. Costing millions of dollars and a potential damage to brand reputation, our aim was to create awareness and visibility to the impact pests can have on food production.
The infographic was highly successful in gaining visibility in leading industry publications and brought to light the often-forgotten issues and cost implications with food production. It received high targeted traffic from features including manufacturing.net, alltop.com and foodsafetytech.com.
Rentokil Case Study
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The results
The Rise of the Rats campaign was responsible for:
- 688% growth in organic page views related to rodent URLs
- £105,497 in estimated advertising value of coverage on key placements
- Average ranking improvement of 23 to 11 for the rodent keywords our URLs were targeting
- 248% increase in the number of keywords ranking in positions 1-3
The Product Recall campaign led to:
- 52% growth in organic page views
- 12% growth in organic sessions
- 500% increase in the number of related keywords ranking on page 1
- 163 related keywords ranking that Rentokil had never previously appeared in the top 50 for.
Overall these campaigns led to a 59% increase in visibility on the domain as a whole and an additional 470,000 organic sessions compared to the previous year.
By the end of the campaigns Rentokil was ranking for an additional 2,200 related keywords across these key sectors, and had seen a 202% growth in the number of keywords on page 1 of Google.