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Hi, I'mLee Onions

Background

ASM was the trading name for a joint venture between myself and an ex-work colleague, Andrew Viner. We decided to collaborate together on a project targeting online insurance services.

We identified a niche in the market which would target people searching for discounts relating to car insurance.  We created a site focused on collecting information regarding current insurance product offerings and aggregated this information in the form of a directory.

After we successfully dominated the search engines for discount car insurance we replicated our operation and strategy within other insurance verticals.

Clients

We worked with over 30 different merchants to create a comprehensive directory of the most popular insurance providers in the UK.

STRATEGY

Note: the approach described below was applicable to the time which is over 5 years ago. Digital practices and algorithms change regularly and some the techniques that worked then are no longer applicable today. Grey Hat SEO was an integral part of the campaigns technique in achieving the successes we managed.

 

We started out building our own bespoke discount-information directory website using Joomla CMS.  Once this became profitable we replicated the same platform for Home Insurance, Pet Insurance and Travel Insurance products over the course of several years.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we did and why….

EXACT MATCH DOMAINS
We utilised the fact that at the time Google gave very significant weighting to the keywords contained within the URL of a domain. This meant that using 'car insurance' in your domain gave us much better chances of ranking for car insurance-related terms. We ensured that our primary domains always contained our best performing keywords to give us an instant SEO boost.
INTERNAL LINKING AND OUTBOUND LINKING
At the time search engines gave significant weighting to internal and external links. We placed direct links to highly relevant and respected websites which were considered an authority for our products.
Link cloaking
We implemented our own cloaking and redirection system to hide our affiliate links from search engines and avoiding any associated penalties.
Paid link building
We conducted our own link building campaigns and spent an average of between £500-£1,000 per month to purchase links and publishing content on high authority websites within relevant verticals. This was carried out as a slow build campaign with a attention given to creating a natural looking link profile.
SERP Optimisation
Our information was time sensitive as discounts and old offers weren't relevant to new visitors. Many of our competitors appearing in the search results didn't update their titles and descriptions. We exploited this by highlighting that we offered up-to-date information which was easily visible when searching. We updated content each month and inserted the current month and year in the page titles to ensure it was always immediately obvious that our information was relevant to the current month. Our high click-through rate and relatively low bounce rate helped boost natural search rankings over time.
On Page SEO
We took the standard approach to optimizing our meta tags, keywords, internal linking etc to try to ensure our content had positive ranking signals.
PPC (Google, Yahoo and Bing)
A significant amount of our traffic came from paid search, whereby we spent around £500-£1,000 per month on sponsored keyword advertising. This helped us increase visits as we often appeared twice in search engine listings (once in paid search and once organically). This gave us the chance to advertise 2 different marketing messages, again helping to increase our overall click-through.
Content marketing and Listing Building
We produced over 100 ‘info guides’ relating to the purchase and decision-making process of buying insurance along with generation information about car DIY and maintenance. Each of our pages contained a subscription form allowing us to build an email list of people who wanted to receive news and info about the latest insurance deals which could be retargeted ever year for renewals.
Conversion optimisation (A-B testing with Clicktale)
We utilised user monitoring tools to analyse users interactions with our critical transaction pages. This, in turn, had a direct impact on our sales and profitability as we boosted conversion rates around 30% through improved 'call to action' placement, styling and labelling.
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