42% increase in year on year organic traffic
"Very pleased with the notable increase in traffic and our increased prominence online", Clifford Lansberry, Partner Gorringe's
The challenge
Gorringe’s challenged us to show what a digital marketing agency could do for their well established and traditional auction house in Lewes. After discussions with Gorringe’s, we identified their main objectives:
- Attract more customers with items to sell at auction through paid search and organic acquisition
- Improve social media engagement – increase number of engaged followers through a consistent and clear plan around social activity
- Raise awareness of Gorringe’s outside of the local area and existing customer base
- Improve website experience – Gorringe’s were one of the first auction houses to offer online bidding, they are beholden to different systems, which can cause confusion for website users – so it was a high priority to create a smoother experience
What we did
PPC – Gorringe’s previously worked with a non-AdWords specialist. We created a brand new account and campaigns based on extensive search term research, targeting departments and other key service offerings, such as valuations for probate.
SEO & Content – We carried out a full technical site audit to improve search visibility and user experience. We implemented a lot of our recommendations ourselves, while working with Gorringe’s developers to implement the remaining recommendations. We also optimised key pages of the website based on our search term research.
We undertook a Competitor Content Audit to enable Gorringe’s to better understand how they were performing against their closest online competitors, while identifying content opportunities for their future marketing plans.
A longer term content and digital marketing plan was created, building brand awareness and trust by showcasing Gorringe’s expertise in the antique industry. This included blog posts, email marketing, reports and creative campaigns, such as an opportunity to ‘Be the Auctioneer’ for the day.
Analytics – We unified analytics to track across all platforms and subdomains to better understand user journeys and interactions on the website.
Customer Survey – We created an incentivised customer survey covering customer profiling, service and website functionality topics, to better inform marketing activity and help Gorringe’s improve their offering
The results
Paid search – The improved AdWords campaign has lead to significantly reduced cost per click, down from an average of 82p in April 2017 to 23p in April 2018.
Improved ads and targeting – Leading to increased click through rates, impressions and improved site metrics: reduced bounce rate (down 19.25%), increased session duration (up 105%)
Organic visibility and traffic increases year on year – Activity has led to Google organic average position increases and greater non-brand traffic. In April, organic traffic was up 42% year on year.
We have utilised Google Tag Manager to ensure more robust tracking across all subdomains and main domain, with goals tracking at all conversion points.
The Customer Survey resulted in a high level of respondents (over 1,800 responses) and insight into possible website and service improvements.
Content strategy and creative campaign – Part of the success seen for organic traffic is improved local content (Guide to Lewes), industry insights (Trends report 2017) and creative competition campaigns (Be the auctioneer).
What Gorringe's said about us
“Very pleased with the notable increase in traffic and our increased prominence online thanks to the marvellous efforts of the GOAT boys.”
Clifford Lansberry
Partner, Gorringe’s