“SiteVisibility have proven to be a reliable and efficient agency, passionate about what they do. This is evident in the work they supply and their eagerness to get the job done”Richard Skidmore - Digital Marketing and Performance Manager - Vax
About Vax
Vax is the UK’s best-selling floor care brand and the only floor care specialist to offer a comprehensive range of carpet cleaners, upright and cylinder vacuum cleaners, cordless, steam and hard floor cleaners.
Executive Summary
Vax came to us in early 2014 with the specific goals of:
- Needing to remove a Google penalty
- Creating an SEO strategy to help them achieve their organic growth targets
- Help Vax to improve the integration of their SEO, social media and PR activities
Over the last 3 years we have worked closely with Vax to achieve all of the above. The results of this have included:
- A successful penalty removal
- Influencer marketing projects generating 83 pieces of offsite coverage and resulting in over 60,000 content views
- Organic traffic growth of 21% YoY 2015 vs 2014
- Organic traffic growth of 6% YoY 2016 vs 2015
As a result of this, Vax recently renewed their contract with us for a further 3 years. We’re incredibly excited and proud to be able to continue our relationship with them and help with the evolution of their marketing strategy.
How we did it: Google Penalty Removal
Step 1: Link Removal and Disavow
The first project we worked on for Vax was to successfully remove a manual Google penalty.
Following a comprehensive review of Vax’s inbound links, we classified a number of links as low quality or not adhering to Google’s guidelines.
We then went through the processes of manually attempting to contact webmasters in attempts to remove links, before eventually using Google’s disavow tool to disavow links that we could not get taken down.
After reviewing thousands of links, SiteVisibility contacted 279 websites over a three-month period, and were able to get the penalty successfully removed.
Step 2: Competitive Link Analysis
Following successful penalty removal there was a need to reassess the link profile of vax.co.uk. The goal here was to gain a better understanding of how competitors were acquiring links in order to inform Vax’s own content marketing strategy.
Ultimately, this backlink analysis led to further discussions about content marketing and ways in which we could leverage Vax’s existing brand advocates. This spawned the Brand Ambassador campaign (detailed below).
Organic Growth
Step 1: Technical Auditing and Consultancy
In the first month of working with Vax, a technical audit was undertaken in order to identify and prioritise any technical issues that were likely inhibiting organic search performance.
At this time, high-priority technical issues included:
- 1 Title Tag Optimisation
- 2 Eliminate Render-blocking JS/CSS
- 3 Fixing XML Sitemap issues
Our technical team worked with Vax to resolve these issues throughout 2014 and 2015 through regular meetings, calls and a shared technical roadmap.
In addition to this, we kept technical performance of vax.co.uk monitored through our quarterly Technical SEO Reviews. This in-house software provides us with a clear overview of Technical SEO issues including: page title and meta description optimisation, http status codes, page duplicity, heading structure and crawl depth.
Step 2: Content Optimisation
In addition to the technical elements of the campaign, an ongoing stream of on-page SEO activity has been undertaken throughout the last 3 years.
Primarily, SiteVisibility has updated meta data for product and category pages whilst continuing to support Vax’s content team with idea generation for blog content, FAQs and user guides.
One of the biggest successes of on-site SEO has been in respect of branded queries. In early Q3 2015 it was highlighted to Vax a major opportunity was being missed with “Vax” not prefixing products with its brand name
The Keyword Opportunity Finder indicated Vax was ranking in position two for most of its branded products. Vax implemented this change in Q3 2015
Results since change
- Positive net ranking change of 250 positions
- 178 Keywords moved in a positive direction
- 93 Keywords decreased
“When it came time for Vax to change strategies in 2017, SiteVisibility helped us to envision and plan this work, offering their expertise in SEO and conversion enhancement. I look forward to continue working with SiteVisibility to drive the ecommerce business forward and to deliver more results.”Richard Skidmore - Digital Marketing and Performance Manager - Vax
Content Marketing
Step 1: Brand Ambassador Campaign
In an attempt to strengthen Vax’s relationships with its customers and gain awareness for its products via content marketing, we began a Brand Ambassador campaign in Q4 2015 for two months.
The campaign focussed around finding customers interested in Vax’s products and encouraging them to submit their cleaning hacks in the form over blog posts. Bloggers would subsequently share this content across their social networks, helping to broaden the reach of the content.
The bloggers were found through previous relationships forged during our ongoing influencer marketing activity, media databases such as Cision, social media prospecting and analysis of the followers of competitors such as Dyson. The target audience was UK & Ireland based home & parenting bloggers. These bloggers each have an engaged following of thousands of people and are seen as influencers in this sector. Many are trusted and provide valuable opinions on products and attractions in particular.
These posts related back to Vax’ position as a floorcare, and more general homecare brand and Vax received coverage through the promotion of these posts on #VaxBrandAmbassador on social media, and through specific mention of the competition, and the bloggers’ dream vax product were they to win.
In total, the brand ambassador campaign delivered:
- 12 Pieces of coverage
- 6500 coverage views
- 50 social shares
Step 2: Influencer Marketing
Following the success of the brand ambassador campaign, we worked with Vax on further influencer marketing activity to help broaden awareness of Vax’s products in line with their target demographics of parents, particularly UK based family & parenting bloggers – the same group as the Brand Ambassador campaign.
We used a combination of influencer prospecting tools as well as our own in-house contacts to secure coverage on a range of lifestyle blogs. Content primarily comprised of products reviews but we also worked with bloggers on YouTube reviews, giveaways and social media content.
Results of this campaign included:
The Results – Organic Search
Have you been penalised with a Google Penalty? Is your site perfoming well from a technical SEO perspective? Do you need help with your on-page optimisation?
Get in touch, our team would be more than happy to help. Give us a call on 01273733433 or contact us via the form below.