Fuelling Vanarama’s organic growth with creative content

Vanarama came to us wanting to diversify their backlink profile. They were sponsoring the National League at the time and this was having a big influence, but getting them a lot of links on football websites. They also wanted to compete with other leading leasing companies and build relevant links to their site to improve authority.

When briefing Evolved and beginning this new approach, the objective was simple: close the gap between Vanarama and competitors, in terms of rankings, content marketing and link building, and increase the quality overall of coverage and links achieved.

Vanarama also wanted to achieve coverage and links in desirable publications, each one ticking the box of a persona within the target audience.

Our outreach strategy ran alongside our technical SEO activity. We began with a link audit which allowed us to identify Vanrama’s existing link profile in comparison to their key competitors.

From this, we were able to handpick the most important backlink gaps. These are sites Vanarama did not feature on, but their competitors did. We could then target these specific sites. Our research showed that they were missing a lot of regional, news and motoring sites.

Through our rigorous ideation methods, we devised campaign ideas to effectively target these backlink gaps, while also maintaining a presence within key automotive publications.

We created a mix of automotive-focused and consumer campaigns as well as campaigns that were linked to tech, as Vanarama lead in providing cars with the latest tech updates. We created everything from highly stylised and design-focused pieces to data-led and commentary-led campaigns. Each piece came with assets relevant and most suitable to the targeted sites.

Because many of the campaigns we created were both topical and evergreen, we were able to revisit them throughout, increasing the potential and going beyond the news cycle to create wider debate online. We even had one campaign that was recreated a year later with the most up-to-date figures and both versions landed over 100 links.