How one automotive brand still makes over £200k a month from Organic Search WITHOUT digital marketing investment

Vanarama, part of the Auto Trader Group is an award-winning personal and commercial vehicle leasing company, well-known for its outstanding customer service and sponsorship of The National League. It’s recognised as one of the digital leaders in the leasing industry, generating up to 150k visits from Organic Search, according to leading SEO tool Ahrefs. Making some conservative assumptions based on years of working in the automotive industry and insights from all the brands we’ve worked with, including this one, we can assume:

• 1% of these visits will result in a lead (1,500)
• 10% of those leads will convert to an order (150)
• The average lifetime value will be worth £1,500+

That totals £225,000 in organic revenue every month. The most interesting part? Vanarama.com no longer appears to invest in SEO. It’s a huge amount to generate considering they may no longer be working on an SEO campaign.

As a performance marketing agency, why would we talk about a brand NOT doing SEO? Just stay with me – there’s a very good reason for this.

After the brand was acquired by AutoTrader in early 2022, it seems that work on the site began winding down, particularly for its car leasing product. Vanarama’s leasing offering was to be owned by AutoTrader, who said at the time, ‘This acquisition will strengthen our existing leasing business and will enable us to offer both the biggest choice of vehicles and a seamless digital experience from search to sale.’

Today, you can still start the car leasing journey through Vanarama, but you’ll need to finish it with AutoTrader.

So, it makes sense that Vanarama would want to reduce costs on a product that they no longer provide.

Costs, content and crawled pages cut, but Vanarama continues to win

I’ll caveat all of this with it only being my opinion and I have no insight as to whether Vanarama truly paused its entire digital marketing efforts. I only know that I personally worked on their SEO campaign around 2021/22 (and it’s still one of my favourites to date). But I think there is a fair amount of evidence to suggest the site stopped working on marketing or at least reduced the time spent. Let’s take a look.

From Google Trends, search interest for ‘Vanarama’ is declining.

Using the Ahrefs Content Changes feature, you can see how often the site’s text was updated, with the dark green indicating ‘overhaul’ changes and the light green showing ‘minor’ changes. 2024 has much fewer significant content updates compared to 2022.

The number of crawled pages decreased by about 3,000 after the acquisition announcement too, going from approximately 9,000 in 2022 to 6,000 today.

As a side note, Paid Search campaigns appear to have slowed down too.

I think there is enough evidence to show that Vanarama has reduced its digital marketing resources.

Then, why does its organic traffic keep getting better and better?

Why do we still see Vanarama ranking on page one of Google Search for a product it doesn’t even provide?

Vanarama might not directly generate £200k in revenue now its car leasing leads are directed to AutoTrader, but it’s still a phenomenal amount of traffic. The point is that if this website was still taking orders, it would be making a significant amount of money without much current SEO investment.

How did this happen?

Put simply, Vanarama’s success in Organic Search is the result of an incredibly strong and robust Brand and SEO combined campaign which mostly focused on Digital PR.

Offline, Vanarama sponsored The National League. Over the years, the partnership helped the brand reach thousands of football fans and received regular coverage from mainstream media. Ryan Reynolds even posted about it on X (formerly Twitter) which caused some exciting (but controversial) publicity.

Online, we delivered a highly successful SEO campaign for Vanarama, producing hundreds of pieces of car leasing-led content, including manufacturer and model pages, plus multiple successful Digital PR pieces, including the ‘Apple Car’ which achieved over 1,200 backlinks.

This created a perfect recipe for success in Organic Search: an established brand that was already recognised by its audience but needed a push from SEO and Digital PR to drive forward. The solid strategy meant that Vanarama was still getting brilliant results long after the site began to wind down.

Why combining Brand and Digital PR is the key to long-lasting success in Organic Search

Digital marketers have known about the importance of Brand for some time now, often referring to it as another SEO pillar in addition to Technical, Onsite Content and Digital PR.

In the automotive industry, it’s clear that this extra pillar is essential to be successful in Search. Recent documents allegedly leaked from Google confirmed the idea that the bigger the brand, the more likely it will outrank competitors. The greater your branded searches and the more clicks you receive, the more likely you will be number one.

It makes sense. Buying or selling a car isn’t a decision customers take lightly. Why would you spend thousands on a brand that you’d never heard of? Why would you put your credit card details into a website you didn’t trust? It’s unlikely. Customers would much rather spend money on visible brands they recognise both online and offline.

A simple way to show how Brand and SEO work together

‘Brand’ is a difficult thing to quantify – we can talk about share of voice, sentiment, and retention, but there are multiple ways to measure it. One of those is branded search volume, which estimates how many times a brand name is searched each month.

Looking at the car leasing sector, there is evidence to suggest larger brands will dominate online purely because of their size and influence.

The table below ranks automotive brands by how visible they are in Google’s search results compared to their branded search volume, specifically those who offer a car leasing product. As you can see, in general, the greater the brand’s search volume, the more visible its domain is (and the more traffic it’ll receive).

However, there is a lot more nuance than this table suggests. First, it’s not perfect in that we can’t include sites like Leasing.com, Carleasing.co.uk or Leasecar.uk as it wouldn’t be possible to determine if the search volume was for their brand or the generic product.

Next, Lex Auto Lease should be at the bottom of the table if we correlate only branded search volume with visibility. But there are several other factors which would allow a site to rank. In Lex Auto Lease’s case, the site has some very unique, helpful guides which are linked to major UK banks, showing how trustworthy the source content is. So it’s not to say that more branded searches will always help you rank better, but it certainly will help.

One of the reasons for this is that a bigger brand is naturally more talked about online, so will achieve more backlinks and, in theory, will likely rank higher than its competitors. AutoTrader has backlinks from around 13,000 referring domains whereas All Car Leasing has just over 1,000.

This is why it’s so important to consider both Brand and SEO combined because when they work together, we see the most success. Not all of AutoTrader’s backlinks come from Digital PR campaigns, but recent consumer news stories about what music makes us better drivers, the influence of ‘Brat’ on car views and how cold weather affects EV batteries certainly appear to be. It’s these stories which customers are actually reading and care about, which means they remember to search for AutoTrader when they’re ready to buy a car.

It’s not just the car leasing sector where we see results like this though – it happens in car finance, too.

Non-automotive brand takes the top spot for ‘car finance’

Back in 2020, Compare the Market ranked on the second page of Google for ‘car finance’ in a matter of months after the landing page was built. It’s fluctuated over the years but has firmly established itself in top positions today, usually ranking in 1st or 2nd place.

It’s estimated that ‘car finance’ is searched 70,000 times a month in the UK, on average, and generates Compare the Market nearly 50,000 organic visits from that single keyword alone.

What’s interesting is that more distinct automotive marketplaces and retailers like AutoTrader and Arnold Clark don’t rank as well. Compare the Market is no doubt a leader for general finance comparison and offers a variety of money products, but I wouldn’t necessarily associate the brand with cars in the way I do for AutoTrader. Compare the Market doesn’t actually do the legwork either; they’re partnered with a car finance broker. But they have the brand power to rank extremely well for a product they don’t exactly provide.

Why is this? Everyone’s seen their meerkat mascot. Over 1 million UK searches are made for the brand’s name each month. I’d certainly expect this to play a significant part in why the page could rank so well and so quickly after it was published.

But to establish it firmly in the top spot, it took some good Digital PR campaigns. This is the perfect example of a strong brand reaping the benefits of SEO tactics – Compare the Market was certainly already established but may not have ‘deserved’ to outrank big automotive brands for a car product. It only needed a few decent backlinks to do so.

Similarly, we see this with other fast-growing brands which take the top spot for ‘PCP’ keywords.

How Digital PR helps this automotive brand cinch a 300k victory

It’s a huge feat for a company which was only founded in 2019 to be generating nearly 300,000 organic visits a month from non-branded keywords. It ranks in top positions for ‘pcp car deals’, ‘pcp finance’ and ‘pcp deals’, which collectively receive over 20,000 searches per month in the UK. That brand would be Cinch, who launched a number of media campaigns around 2021, from prime-time TV spots to adverts on trucks.

During this period, Cinch’s site was in a good place from an Organic Search perspective, but an increase in backlinks since 2023 has made it great, which seem to mostly come from Digital PR expert commentary.

Cinch is frequently seen sharing expertise on lots of automotive consumer topics, from the best cars for elderly drivers to money-saving fuel efficiency tips. This is a typical Digital PR tactic and means they’ve received recent backlinks in Yahoo, The Sun and The Express.

It looks like Cinch was always achieving backlinks thanks to its brand-building activity, but the additional Digital PR activity in recent years has truly accelerated the site’s Organic performance. The site also excels at helpful content, with many in-depth guides and unique tools which have no doubt contributed to its success.

Combining Brand, SEO and Digital PR is crucial to accelerate your success in Search

If your marketing strategy already focuses on building your brand using PPC, Paid Social, Influencer or Offline Advertising, you’re (hopefully) in a good place. Customers know who you are and trust you when buying or selling their next car.

But to alleviate the costs of Paid Marketing, it’s essential to leverage your brand power and use that in SEO. Simply put, it’s the best way to work smarter, not harder, to get results in Search.

It’s so much easier to rank for competitive, high-traffic keywords if you already have an established brand. Digital PR also works much faster for brands who are known by journalists, as they’re more likely to publish their content, which is therefore more likely to get noticed by potential customers. Even if bigger brands have a lot of backlinks acquired naturally, a lot of these aren’t in publications with stories that resonate with a wide audience. Adding Digital PR tactics means you can tell stories that customers care about from a brand they know well, meaning they’re more likely to remember you when it’s time to buy.

Vanarama’s success isn’t unique. Brand and SEO combined isn’t anything particularly new, but the Digital PR campaigns were extremely successful, which is one of the reasons why it’s been able to remain so strong.

It won’t last forever. In fact, the site’s organic traffic is estimated to be around 17% down compared to its peak in 2023, but this is a relatively slow decline. However, to have the site in such a strong position in Search after presumably many months of reduced work and budgets is not something to be ignored. If the site hadn’t wound down work, who knows where they could be now?

If you want to know how you can combine your Brand, SEO and Digital PR efforts to be the next automotive leader in Organic Search, get in touch.