By Chris Lee

Specialist insurance company Just Landlords, whose main offering is providing insurance products and services to landlords, wanted to create more visibility online through natural search rankings to increase insurance sales conversions. To achieve this goal, in November 2009 it brought full service digital agency Gravytrain on board.

At the outset of the search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, Just Landlords received just 108 visits and 74 conversions of insurance product sales each month. One year later traffic had increased by more than 1,500 visits and achieved 950 more conversions.

NMK caught up with Gravytrain’s head of search Matthew Oxley to learn how these figures were achieved.

The SEO challenge

The main product of Just Landlords is “Landlord Insurance” and so the main focus was centered on increasing the visibility in Google for the search terms “Landlord Insurance” and “Landlords Insurance”, Oxley explained.

“We came across two major challenges with the Just Landlords campaign,” he told NMK. “The first lay in the fact that the Just Landlords website is relatively new; it’s usually very difficult to get websites ranking for highly competitive terms until they’ve been around a few years. To get around this we built a tier of highly trusted links to the website to accelerate its trust and authority from a search engine’s perspective.

“The second challenge was taking over an account where the previous SEO activity was too aggressive and appeared to be causing the website to the penalised. We corrected this by making technical changes to the website to bring it within normal parameters,” Oxley added.

Search strategy

In order to achieve higher rankings for Just Landlord’s preferred search terms and increase overall visibility of the site, Gravytrain implemented a complete SEO strategy that consisted of the following elements:

Link Building: Since taking over the SEO for Just Landlords, Gravytrain has continually built links to the site from relevant, trustworthy and highly rated sites. This has been done by negotiating links with other sites and by creating interesting pieces of content that sites will naturally want to link to.

Content: Gravytrain has created a blog and news section for the Just Landlords site, providing daily updated content that is original, engaging and optimised for SEO through the use of keywords and internal links.

Social Media: To help drive more traffic to the site, create brand awareness, syndicate content and increase visibility on the Internet, Gravytrain has created and maintained a Twitter and Facebook account for Just Landlords.

Reaping the rewards

The main aim of the SEO strategy for Just Landlords was to increase online visibility through higher rankings for key terms. Since conducting SEO for Just Landlords Gravytrain has been able to move them into a strong first page position on Google for multiple competitive terms, including “Landlord Insurance”, “Landlords Insurance” and “Rent Guarantee Insurance”.

After 18 months the number of visits to JustLandlords.co.uk has increased by more than 2,400 visits and the number of conversions has followed the same pattern, increasing by over 1,400 from 74 to 1,538.

“The Just Landlords Case study demonstrates clearly that while SEO can take time to be successful, the eventual cost effectiveness often significantly outperforms other channels,” Oxley concluded. “Just Landlords has been able to attract high performing traffic for around a quarter a cost of their paid search campaign – a great win in itself, but this has also allowed them to beat the trend of cost-per-click inflation in paid search and diversify their traffic mix.”