Client Profile
‘Just Pass’ is one of the most competitively priced driving schools in Birmingham. Whether, you’ve never held the steering wheel or you are almost ready to appear for your driving test, Just Pass will have a training program just for you.
As they are really particular about quality, they only hire DSA qualified driving instructors.
These instructors not only focus on making you a better driver but also help you pass your driving test at the earliest.
Challenges
We took over JustPass.co.uk’s SEO campaign in May, 2017.
After analyzing the then stats for their website, we knew there was a lot to improve. The challenges that we faced at the start are as follows.
- Highly competitive and specific niche: Driving is a tricky treat.
- You want to get into the driving seat and accelerate the tyres warm but then you don’t know how to drive.
- Well, that’s everyone when they start. This makes the availability of good driving schools crucial. And competition in the business? Well, it’s more than one can normally expect.
- Same way, the competition lineup for JustPass.co.uk too was stiff. This needed proper planning and implementation.
- Low traffic and less sales.
- Poor search rankings: Major keywords were not ranking well in Google SERPs.
On-page issues and how we dealt with those
We are all aware that in a proper SEO strategy goes an amalgamation of both on-page and off-page characteristics.
To start with, we took the website’s (justpass.co.uk) on-page character in consideration.
After a thorough analysis we had results which indicated the need of a few design changes. Here is a list of those issues and the solutions that we fixed those with.
Issues that we found
- Although, their website had many web pages. None of those were optimized enough.
- Their meta-data was not adding any value. Also, it lacked relevance and proper keywords.
- Category pages lacked relevance and useful tags
- Some of their webpages had thin content. Web pages with thin content can’t rank in the SERPs anymore
Also, apart from being important for search rankings, quality content is crucial to keep users informed and entertained throughout their journey.
Solutions that we came up with
- Titles, headlines, meta descriptions for web pages, category tags and tags for articles were changed.
- The aim was to make use of meta data as it is a powerful factor which inflicts search rankings.
- Replaced old, thin content with new engaging content which would interact better with the users.
- Also, we used the right keywords which we listed out after in-depth keyword research.
- Titles, headlines, meta descriptions for web pages, category tags and tags for articles. Everything was updated.
- The aim was to make use of meta data as it is a powerful factor which inflicts search rankings.
- Replaced old, thin content with new engaging content which would interact better with the users.
- Also, we ensured the right use of important keywords which we listed out after in-depth keyword research sessions.
Off-page issues and how we resolved those
After suggesting and implementing on-page changes, the next step included improvements in the off-page strategy.
We used Rankwatch’s backlink analysis tool to come up with the backlinks profile for justpass.co.uk. Going through which we found the following.
Issues that we came across
- No presence on authority websites.
- Less number of links.
- Sites linking to actiondays.co.uk lacked authority and web traffic.
Solutions that we gave
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- Citations: The first thing that we observed after an off-page character analysis of justpass.co.uk was that they lacked web presence.
Be it backlinks or mentions, their website was lacking both. We took immediate action.
We completed citations for justpass.co.uk on 337 websites. 270 out of these 337 are live and 77 are under moderation.
Indulging in citations on high authority websites like foursquare.com and yell.com works towards improving search rankings.
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- Guest Posting: The next thing we did was made a list of blogs and websites in and around Just Pass’ niche.
We used a few search terms as “top blogs to learn driving” to come up with driving tutorial blogs.
We raided the search results for blogs with decent web traffic and authority. Now, being done with the blogs’ list, it was time to find the blogs’ owners’ contacts and pitch them for Guest posting.
The email template that worked the best for us went like:
“Hello, [Name]
I’ve been a subscriber of [Blog Name] for some time now – and I especially enjoy reading to [Blog category/section/series name] on daily basis.
I’ve been working on an idea for a post about [blog idea] – and it struck me that this would be a great fit for your audience. Recently, I’ve had several successful guest posts on major blogs including [Blog Name], [Blog Name] and [Blog Name] – which you can see here:
LINK #1
LINK #2
LINK #3
The working headline for the post is [title] although I’m open to changing it up if needed. I feel that the post would be especially relevant to your readers because [State how it will help the readers] The summary of post is…
[Bulleted list or paragraph summary of your blog]
Although there are many such blogs out there that covers the same thing, I haven’t seen a lot of posts that walk readers through [main key point] very well. For that reason, I think your readers would find it very useful.
What do you think? Should I write it up and send you a draft?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts,
Thanks, [Your Name]”
Using the above email template we managed to get 11 guest posts on some decent authority websites.
While picking websites or blogs for guest posting, it is also important to make sure that those websites have real web traffic and presence in organic search results.
The DAs of these blogs ranged from 39 to 60.
Results
Now, the SEO campaigns for Justpass.co.uk had been running for a while and results started slow.
It had been exactly a month and we could see the search rankings and the traffic go up. Dramatically.
By the end of eighteen months, the websites traffic hiked up to 363.53%.
And conversions? A whopping boost of 1,450.00% was seen in conversions. For a better understanding, look at the graphical data below.
Old traffic stats (May, 2017 – 274)
Recent traffic stats (October, 2018 – 1233)
Old conversion stats (May, 2017 – 4)
Recent conversion stats (October, 2018 – 62)
Traffic comparison (May, 2017 and October 2018)
Search Engine Rankings (positioning) before/after comparison
Final words
Managing SEO campaign for ‘JustPass.co.uk’ got us to face a few challenges. Their website had issues as mentioned in the sections above.
We did our research in and around their online competition. The results educated us about the potential keywords which they could rank for.
Starting with refining the on-page character of their website we introduced changes as mentioned in this article. To support their SEO from around the web, we indulged in citations and guest posting.
The whole campaign came along good as the results were in favor. That is also why we were compelled to sharing this case study with our readers.
We hope this helped you!
