1,156% ROI for UK’s largest leisure charitable social enterprise
A revenue driven organic strategy generated a £2.1 million increase in organic revenue
GLL and their consumer-facing brand Better are the UK’s largest leisure charitable social enterprise, managing over 250 public sport and leisure centres and 57 libraries through partnerships with over 30 local councils and other sporting organisations.
The challenge
GLL had two main objectives for 2018:
- To manage and drive organic search and content performance
- Take ownership of GLL’s digital reputation through maintenance and growth
The solution
A revenue driven organic strategy focused on delivering meaningful, sustainable returns in the quickest time frame possible through SEO, content and promotion.
The first step was to conduct a thorough review of the technical performance of better.org.uk to ensure growth was built upon solid foundations. We worked with GLL’s server log files to get an under the bonnet view of how search engines are engaging with the site, which uncovered several key issues including:
- 26% of all search engine requests resulted in some form of redirection, burning unnecessary crawl budget, delaying crawl and indexation and restricting the flow of internal link equity through the site.
- Externally linked to URLs on GLL that returned a 404 response resulting in a complete loss of link equity, which included URLs linked to from authority sites such as the BBC.
- Large scale keyword cannibalisation conflicts originating from multiple pages targeting the same keywords. This restricted page level performance and limited the volume of keywords that could be targeted within the overall site architecture.
With over 250 centres in the UK an emphasis of our technical strategy was put into Local SEO with the management, creation and optimisation of centre profiles and equivalent web pages.
Swimming was identified as another key growth area from an organic perspective, but the ranking URL required additional links in order to improve performance. We set out on a targeted creative campaign leveraging video as a form to gain attention from publishers and improve on-site engagement.
GLL Case Study
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The results
A 1156% ROI generated through a 19% uplift in organic traffic (an additional 2.4m visits), and a 45% increase in organic revenue (an additional increase of £2.1m) YOY.
Our contentless link building drove an additional 158 links to the domain from a range of reputable sources. Tactics included realigning links previously lost to 404s or legacy brand owned domains, turning un-linked brand mentions into links, and local citation building for each of their centres within local councils, directories and community sites. We had a contact to live link conversion rate of 31%!
These links together with the technical consulting drove an uplift in visibility of 18% for priority keywords.
As a result of the retargeting and optimisation of fitness class content and the introduction of 9 new pages we generated a 41% uplift in organic visibility for associated terms, driving a 114% rise in organic traffic (or +103k organic visits) YOY:
Our swimming campaign resulted in 4 branded videos and coverage from a number of high profile and dedicated sport publications including:
The result was a 64% uplift in page views for the main swimming product page.
Don't just take our word for it!
While the results of this campaign speak for themselves, it is important to note that the agency fit we have found in Builtvisible is certainly one of the main determining factors in this level of shared success. A thorough review of our technical performance flagged a number of legacy issues, resulting in a complete overhaul of our technical strategy and ultimately the best ROI we’ve seen in years. Proof that making the move to Builtvisible was the best thing we ever did!
