Case Study
Organic Traffic increased by
27%
year on year
Conversion Rate Increase increased by
87%
over 6 months
Organic Traffic increased by
27%
year on year
Conversion Rate Increase increased by
87%
over 6 months
Barking Mad are the largest dog sitting service providers in the country, they have won countless business awards, including recently Amazon Growing Business awards. The founders are considered to be one of the best companies in the country for franchise growth.
However with all of this the website and franchisees digital presence was weakening. Organic traffic was dropping and generally the business needed to take the next step in online. We Are Web was approached to do this. The project was both demanding in terms of results and communication to a network of over 60+ franchisees, each one a business owner/manager.
With such a large strategy we needed to make wholesale changes to the website and the enrollment of new franchisees, the challenge was to first educate over 70 franchisee members so that they could understand our mission. We set up bespoke training and webinars for franchisees and ensured for the first time all had a view of their own website traffic and conversion tracking. Once set up via Google Analytics and using a simplified reporting system called DashThis.com, the business now has a better idea of how many leads they receive online each month.
The next stage was to make substantial on page SEO changes to the website, this would provide quick wins. We also set up 1,000’s of relevant new pages on the website, this enhanced the relevancy and overall visibility of the website at a local level. Each franchisee having their own set of keywords defined and key geographical areas.
The company franchisees where all individually paying for Google Adwords, within the first two months we completely rebuilt all of these accounts. Taking data from the previous years and educating ourselves on the audience and keywords. Competitor research also dramatically aided us at this stage, understanding the key converting audiences and keywords in the market was crucial to success. We had to ensure we kept CPC low and quality high.
We noticed in particular that the network had really been focusing for years on the keyword group ‘dog sitting’ when ‘dog boarding’ was actually a better converting keyword with less average CPC, and also produced more profitable leads.
Remarketing on Adwords was then also set up, something the company had never previously done.
The company franchisees were all individually paying for Google Adwords, within the first two months we completely rebuilt all of these accounts. Taking data from the previous years and educating ourselves on the audience and keywords. Competitor research also dramatically aided us at this stage, understanding the key converting audiences and keywords in the market was crucial to success. We had to ensure we kept CPC low and quality high.
We noticed in particular that the network had really been focusing for years on the keyword group ‘dog sitting’ when ‘dog boarding’ was actually a better converting keyword with less average CPC, and also produced more profitable leads.
Remarketing on Adwords was then also set up, something the company had never previously done.
Conversion Rate Increase increased by
87%
over 6 months
A separate objective was to look at the franchisees unique recruitment of what they called hosts, a host was a person who volunteered to look after a dog, this in turn brought companionship. We tested this through Facebook advertising and saw some promising results. This was the biggest pain point the franchisees faced, recruiting new hosts, without them they could not scale their business. For years the business had struggled to provide the message of the benefits of hosting a dog into the online space, both in terms of context and channels. Facebook was a good start for this journey.
Long term we focused specially on improving national and local keywords through citation link building to improve the dwindling Organic traffic. This coupled with creating new pages increased the long and medium tail traffic brought into the website, but more importantly gave the franchisees warmer leads. We found the larger internet based competitors would only focus on cities, whereas our strategy was to pick off the low hanging and broadening out target towns and villages within each franchisees area.
Alongside the marketing project we worked with Barking Mad’s designers and developers to improve UX and the website conversion rate, we used tools such as Inspectlet.com to understand what users where interested in. We found mainly flaws in the mobile version of the website and content flow. We also introduced third party review software Trustpilot to the company.
Overall the business and website was now set up for digital marketing, in particular SEO and PPC, something of which is critical to the business.
Organic Traffic increased by
27%
year on year
Conversion Rate Increase increased by
87%
within 6 months
Overall Conversions increased by
47%
within 6 months
Allow us to show you how we can change your business
Organic Traffic
over 9 months
Organic Traffic
Over 16 months
Conversion Rate Increase
from launch
Digital Leads
Jan 2016 – Mar 2017
Organic Traffic
from Jan 14 - Mar 16
