How Aira Helped Uswitch Up Their Share Of Voice By 20% Using Link Building
The Challenge
Drive Share of Voice Through Scaled Link-Building
When Bekah Edwards joined the RVU team, her main goal was to drive traffic to the website and increase their share of voice. But the problem she faced was that the marketing team was small and in the beginning stages of setup.
But the problem she faced was that the marketing team was small and in the beginning stages of setup. Her team needed to increase content and in-house marketing activity while maintaining a dominant position with a strong link-building strategy.
With the monumental responsibility of driving organic visibility across a diverse portfolio of brands, Bekah wanted to build out a new internal marketing team. This team was to focus on increasing content marketing and in-house outreach activity, with the outside help of expert agencies to scale link-building.
‘A key part of our role is offsite SEO, anything to do with driving authority back to the website. So, links are really vital for us,’ Bekah explains.
Bekah turned her focus to one of RVU’s biggest brands, Uswitch, a key brand with service products relating to broadband, energy, and mobile. Uswitch’s starting position was strong. Already way ahead of their competitors in terms of the number of referring domains, the main challenge was to maintain, defend, and then grow their position in key verticals to stay ahead of competitors.
With a hefty share of voice target for verticals such as energy and broadband, it became clear that links were more important than ever.
With very few processes in place and aggressive targets to hit, Bekah realised they couldn’t get it off the ground all on their own.
‘That's when we decided to look for some agency partners because we were growing the team at the same time,’ says Bekah.
‘A key part of our role is offsite SEO, anything to do with driving authority back to the website. So, links are really vital for us.’
The Solution
A detailed procedure for consistent link-building
She found Aira on LinkedIn and invited them to pitch for one of the other RVU brands—Money.co.uk. She quickly realised that Aira could add value to RVU’s more sizeable brands, too.
‘Aira’s presentation was well-formatted, well thought out. What I liked was they had upfront processes. They showed that process around determining topics,’ she explains.
From the get-go, Bekah was confident in moving Aira off of working on Money.co.uk, and immediately getting them started on Uswitch instead. As a larger investment brand, Uswitch could benefit from Aira’s strategy, and Aira was confident that they could be of help in hitting Uswitch’s aggressive KPIs.
The partnership between Uswitch and Aira got off to a great start. Bekah wasn’t used to dealing with agencies as efficient as Aira was. In the past, her dealings with other partners had been more ad hoc. To her delight, the contract and onboarding process was simple.
Bekah wanted a unified strategy to be delivered across her team and agency partner, which would enable Uswitch to scale their link-building. She wanted her team to focus on an audience strategy, while Aira focused on growing Uswitch’s backlink profile—specifically new niche domains to increase value and search visibility.
‘It was all very efficient. They’ve got very dedicated account managers. In terms of the people, it's people you work with day in, day out. Aira is easy to get along with. They don't make you feel like you are just a client, you do have that personal relationship. We see them as an extension of our team,’ says Bekah.
Aira’s plan for success was streamlined. After carefully analysing competitor campaigns, keyword opportunities, and backlink profiles, Aira was able to use data and insights to create digital PR campaigns that would appeal to their primary audience across the energy, mobile, and broadband sectors.
Aira’s link intersect analysis showed that there was a huge opportunity for Uswitch to secure new international linking domains. This, combined with the insight that searches for “electric vehicle” were up by 60% in the last 12 months, presented the perfect opportunity for a digital PR campaign—and so, ‘The Top Selling Electric Car in Every Country' was born.
Bekah liked that Aira gave a lot of background when pitching ideas, with upfront processes and explanations.
‘Sometimes when we get those ideas, we just get people presenting the ideas to us. We don't tend to get a lot of the background behind why they're doing it,’ Bekah states.
Aira created visually engaging, interactive data-led content pieces and through collaborative campaigns, Aira helped create relevant niche-specific content. These pieces were attractive and spoke to Uswitch’s audience because of the content’s originality and simple execution. Using crystal clear and easy to understand datasets, Aira has provided a wealth of information and soundbites for PR use and audience engagement.
‘Everything that they're doing is contributing to that overarching goal of increasing our share of voice for Uswitch,’ Bekah says.
These campaigns allow Uswitch to gain many placements on different sites. This builds authority with Google, fostering trust for their site. In turn, Google’s algorithm raises the ranking of the site, effectively pushing more organic traffic to Uswitch’s site.
‘Having the right campaigns at the right time drives relevant traffic to our site, to our links. This increases relevancy for those topics, which is going to help our ability to rank for those topics,’ explains Bekah.
In a bi-weekly call, the Aira team and the Uswitch team go through new industry updates and anything the team is working on. This ensures that Aira remains up-to-date and on-brief. Bekah’s team always has an opportunity to provide feedback, jump in with ideas, or discuss any reactive opportunities that might be relevant.
‘It’s very much an open forum for everyone to discuss ideas, it's very collaborative. You don't have to chase anything because the process is there and you know if the deadlines are in, they're going to be met,’ Bekah asserts.
As an expert in energy, Uswitch values accuracy, and correct data. When incorrect data was mistakenly published, Aira was upfront about it and worked quickly to get the correct data published.
‘If something happened, they were able to help - speak to the relevant experts to help rectify that. They wouldn't just say, “you paid for the campaign and you didn't spot it, so it was on you.” They actually helped us and went back and forth,’ Bekah says.
‘Having the right campaigns at the right time drives relevant traffic to our site, to our links. Everything that they're doing is contributing to that overarching goal of increasing our share of voice.’
The Results
A collaborative push to hit link-building targets monthly
With Aira, Uswitch has managed to accelerate hitting their targets. In some campaigns, targets have been completely surpassed and fierce KPI goals have been hit consistently.
‘Without their support, we wouldn’t have got to those targets quicker. We wouldn’t have been able to move onto the next thing. We’ve got the peace of mind that it’s going on, ticking over in the background,’ Bekah says.
Aira has helped Uswitch uncover and tap into new niches and areas of focus. This got them noticed by relevant audiences and drove traffic to the site and increased their share of voice.
‘Aira has helped us explore some of these topics where we've needed to take a deeper dive because we haven't necessarily been experts in those areas,’ Bekah explains.
Through a combination of factors, like 200+ links built in 8 months and 350 pieces of coverage secured as a result, along with other internal initiatives, Uswitch’s share of voice within the energy space has gone up by 20% thanks to the combined efforts of both Aira and the in-house team.
On top of that, 45% of the links secured have a domain rating of over 50, showing that quality is always at the forefront of the team’s mind. These results were seen over the course of 7 campaigns
Although targets are not met every month, there is always a flexible plan in place to try to overcome that. The team works to the law of averages and with the world the way it is right now - COVID, presidential elections, and global disasters - a combined effort is needed to maintain efforts.
‘For me, it is knowing that we can rely on them. That's what has made it so successful because there are other agencies that we've worked with who get good results every now and then, but we can't consistently rely on them to deliver things, to deliver on time. I felt like with Aira, we know what we're getting every month and it just helps us,’ says Bekah.
‘Without their support, we wouldn’t have got to those targets quicker. We wouldn’t have been able to move onto the next thing. We’ve got the peace of mind that it is going on, ticking over in the background.’