Going the extra mile for GoodBye Car’s organic performance

The GoodBye Car brand was created by the Peter Vardy Group mainly to increase their used car stock and compete with disruptor brands. Our existing relationship with the company and our proven track record within the automotive sector meant that we were the first agency they approached to help with this.

GoodBye Car asked us to create and deliver an SEO strategy that would allow them to be more visible online and stand out in the market, focusing on Scotland as a primary location. Alongside SEO, the client wanted a successful user interface that not only improved the customer experience but also converted those users to either buy or sell their vehicles on their website.

The GoodBye Car website was relatively new when we began working on it in early 2021, consisting of only a few pages and next to no search visibility. This presented us with a great opportunity to shape the site keeping the audience, and search, in mind.

Content strategy

As we were essentially starting from scratch, we had the chance to craft the site to perform the best in search and offer a great user experience. We started by undertaking comprehensive keyword and user intent research, understanding what customers are searching for and what search engines are ranking, to find gaps where we could.

There were two main takeaways from our initial research; GoodBye Car’s site needed strong landing pages that converted, as well as to prove their expertise with informational content which helps users make informed decisions.

To act on the research, we created an advice hub on the site, writing well-researched guides to answer user queries like ‘How to sell a car’ and ‘What happens to insurance when I sell my car?’, which improved the site’s relevancy for car selling terms, providing expert guidance for users, all while introducing them to GoodBye Car’s service. Due to a gap in the market and well-written content, we were able to secure several first-page rankings for these queries.

There was also a gap for specific vehicle content, we found there was a lot of cumulative search volume surrounding the term ‘sell my (make/model)’. To react to this, we helped design and implement manufacturer pages, with deeper pages to display each model, and worked on producing informative content for these pages.

Technical strategy

The uniqueness of this account was that we were given the freedom by the client to implement any changes we felt were necessary. We started with a technical SEO audit, followed by completing initial housekeeping tasks. We then worked continuously throughout the campaign to maintain specific elements, offering a solid technical foundation, as well as ensuring any new site features added by our integrated teams were done using best practices.

Digital PR strategy

After the first 6 months of the campaign focusing solely on improving the website content and technical setup, we started to plan how to inject a link-building strategy to improve SERP ranking. We produced several content marketing campaigns and reactive digital PR campaigns to secure quality backlinks to the website and improve visibility.

Conversion rate optimisation

As part of our integrated SEO services, we aligned our in-house CRO experts with the team at GoodBye Car to ensure that any work we completed was using an audience-first approach.

While we were driving up the number of visits to the website through organic channels, we addressed that the conversion rate could be improved. As GoodBye Car is a lead generation website, we conducted sales interviews to understand what website queries were coming in and how we could potentially resolve objections in the first instance, by changing or improving the user funnel.

Our focus on informational content paid off, with a 55% year-on-year (YoY) increase in impressions to guide content. In addition, clicks to guide pages increased by 15%.

While this traffic is less likely to convert directly into users submitting a car valuation than a transactional page would, it is still an important part of awareness in the user journey. There have also been many studies showing the correlation between providing quality informational content with an improvement in transactional query rankings.

With this in mind, we were also able to increase traffic to transactional pages, leading to a 14% organic conversion rate increase. Impressions for transactional pages improved 17% YoY, as well as clicks by a whopping 79%.

Our Digital PR efforts allowed an unknown brand to become more recognised with an increase of 443% branded clicks and 194% branded impressions YoY. In total across the campaign, we secured 297 backlinks over three years, several of which were organic and targeted backlink gaps among competitors, as well as automotive specialist sites that GoodBye Car’s audience visited.