Achieving a 727% surge in used car leads through strategic SEO

Digital PR

With our knowledge of the automotive industry, we knew that journalists would want to hear from Peter Vardy, an authority in the auto dealership industry. We also knew that visual and data-led campaigns worked particularly well in this sector. To harness this, and ensure we maintained and grew their authority on motoring, we provided a mixture of campaigns that would do this.

This included creating visual campaigns that were unique to Peter Vardy, alongside utilising Peter Vardy’s expertise through expert commentary.

To do this, we monitored the news and engaged with journalists on trending topics, such as the semiconductor shortage, and the cost of electric vehicles. This effort alone resulted in links in publications such as Forbes, a website with over 150 million monthly visitors, positioning Peter Vardy at the forefront of the industry.

We also jumped on money-saving trends, including how to help drivers save £1,700, resulting in 304 total links and 40 organic links. 

In addition, we continued to press ahead with our strategic approach and create hero and proactive campaigns, enabling us to target a variety of automotive press and, alongside the thought-leadership approach, close the gap between Peter Vardy and their competitors. We produced campaigns such as the first Geariodic Table, resulting in 17 highly relevant links. The Numberplate Quiz also generated a total of 136 high-quality links.

Onsite Content

The Peter Vardy website’s content for used cars lacked optimisation and failed to provide valuable information to customers. As a result, the site missed critical ranking opportunities, which likely impacted potential car sales.

To tackle this, Evolved created brand-new content for their manufacturers and priority model pages to help customers and improve rankings.

We also created a used car page, targeting generic terms and location-based KWs for Scotland.

For the new car content, this was a brand-new section of the site. These pages were to be informative, helping potential customers learn about different cars and find offers that were right for them.

For this, we generated content for the pages displaying the offers. These were a combination of car manufacturer and model pages.

Each page introduced the car, featured the latest offers and told potential customers more about the vehicles, highlighting the benefits. The pages were optimised for long and short keywords but focussed on customer experience to provide real value.

Technical SEO

We undertook a full technical SEO audit and identified a large issue with bloat across the website, which was holding performance back. The reason for this bloat was 100,000s of duplicate new and used car pages, caused by their search feature.

From a website crawl, there were approximately 25,000 URLs across the site. However, Google Search Console was reporting over 335,000 URLs, most of which were not indexed. The duplicate pages used canonical tags, but they weren’t being honoured by Google. We needed to reduce the reliance on canonical tags as a strategy and resolve crawl bloat issues.

We worked closely with the Peter Vardy team and their developers to come up with an ideal URL structure and completed a full URL restructure across the site. Rather than using a subfolder structure, we implemented a parameter URL structure for filters like colour, engine type and location so we could control the amount of URLs that Google is able to crawl, ensuring that the crawl rate is efficient and optimised.

The main restructure handled used car pages which resulted in an improvement in generic key terms, and Peter Vardy started to rank for the key terms ‘used cars’ and ‘used cars for sale’ for the very first time. We researched and rolled out a new URL structure for new cars too, with great success.