How we grew keyword visibility by 779% YoY and landed 174 pieces of coverage for a new UK EV subscription brand
The Challenge & Opportunity
The UK EV subscription market was emerging fast, but consumer understanding of the subscription model was lagging behind demand for EVs themselves. The client was entering a category alongside a small number of direct challengers, with large, established lease and rental brands also sitting in the same search space.
The client had a young domain, a thin content footprint, and a referring domain profile in the early stages of growth with a site migration on the immediate horizon too. They needed an organic search partner who could de-risk the migration, build out SEO across the full buyer's journey, and earn the kind of coverage that builds topical authority and brand strength.
This wasn't a category with established demand and buyers fighting for share. Demand for EVs was rising fast, but subscription wasn't yet on most consumers' shortlist - which meant our job was as much about educating the market as ranking inside it. Our SEO and digital PR work had to do two jobs at once - rank for the terms in-market buyers were already searching for, and build the brand’s authority in the conversations that would shape the next wave of demand.
- Alex Fiske, Digital PR Lead
Our Organic Search team benchmarked the client against direct subscription competitors and the broader lease and rental brands they’d compete with as their content and product footprint grew.
The solution
Our Organic Search team took a phased, search-first approach. They mapped out technical SEO, content and digital PR across the first 12 months, dialling up and down the services as needed across the year, to ensure investment was placed where it was needed most.
1. A de-risked site migration
The migration came first. Pre-migration work covered benchmarking, architecture review, redirect mapping and testing, and in-flight developer support.
2. Keyword and content depth across the buyer’s journey
With the migration stable, we built out content clusters across awareness (people still deciding whether an EV made sense at all), consideration (people comparing subscription against PCP and lease) and decision stages (people choosing between specific models).
We balanced quick wins (the brand was ranking on page 2 or below for over 860 keywords at the start of the engagement) with new awareness-stage hub pages designed to capture early interest from prospective consumers.
3. A 12-month digital PR activity calendar
Digital PR sat alongside the SEO activity to earn coverage and links on authoritative, relevant publications the target audience actually reads.
We planned four quarterly ‘hero’ topics across the year tied to consumer trends and insights we uncovered from the media landscape. Each hero topic had a dedicated larger campaign, with a steady stream of reactive opportunities slotted in between to keep outreach consistent month-on-month.
We deliberately sat in the hyper-relevant lane - the future of EVs, green energy, ease of ownership, myth-busting EVs and charging points - rather than chasing volume with looser, broader hooks. That trade-off matters, especially for younger brands where fewer, more relevant links mean traffic that’s closer to in-market intent, and a brand that builds genuine topical authority.
- Alex Fiske, Digital PR Lead
Campaigns were data-led. As the client's own data was still limited at this stage, we worked entirely from external sources - government data, trusted third-party datasets, and surveys run through reputable UK providers - and brought the findings to life as reports and infographics.
The Results
Over our first 12 months together, we delivered against every KPI and built the organic foundations the brand needed to scale further.
Keyword visibility grew 779% YoY, significantly outpacing the closest direct competitor (223% YoY) and the wider competitor set. Organic sessions were up 125% YoY, organic traffic in the final quarter was up 105% on the same period the year before, and rich results grew 187% in the back half of the year.
Our digital PR programme landed 174 pieces of coverage and 114 links (90-120 link KPI), with 76 new referring domains. A link back to the client’s content for every 1.5 pieces of coverage was evidence that journalists were finding a genuine reason to link, not just to mention the brand.
Coverage was earned across UK national and lifestyle press, motoring titles, green and eco websites, and regional publications, including The Express, The Sun, Fleet Point, Renewable Energy magazine, Zap Map, Clean Technica and Daily Record.
The referring domain profile grew 149% over the year, and the landing pages we outreached drove 3,800+ sessions directly attributable to digital PR over the 12 months.
Motoring is one of the most competitive verticals in digital PR. Publications are inundated, and EV news in particular was increasingly saturated at the time. Unique stories from our campaigns, and helpful content turned into tips and expert advice, cut through the noise. Just as important was how each piece was structured and where it sat on-site, so every campaign supported the pages we needed to build visibility for, and the wider SEO strategy.
- Alex Fiske, Digital PR Lead
If you're entering a new category with a young domain and need SEO and digital PR to do two jobs at once, get in touch to book a call with our Head of Digital and Digital PR Lead, and we'll walk you through how we'd approach it for your brand.