Our client, global leader for online takeaway ordering, challenged us to build high trust links from the national press to increase awareness to all the English-speaking countries they operate in as well as a selection of high-value European countries where they wanted to increase their market share.
The brief was to build SEO traffic across multiple countries including:
UK
Ireland
Poland
Switzerland
Austria
France
Australia
New Zealand
This would primarily be done through technical SEO and Digital PR campaigns to drive links into core pages in each country.
Due to the size of the website involved, we knew that a dedicated crawling and technical SEO strategy was required. Also due to the already large link base, we knew that general links to the homepage were not going to cut it - we needed relevant links pointing to product category pages and campaign pages to grow very specific areas of the site. We knew we were also sitting on large amounts of 1st party data that the press would be interested in reporting on the eating trends of the nation.
Tactically we needed to think through every move we made on this site so that every change could be implemented and checked at scale across millions of URLs. Our tactics included:
Unique crawling strategies using regex pattern crawling
Building our own software for internal linking
Building a tool to help with new page indexing
Integrating into the technical team and working from the clients office one day per week
Working with the PR teams to share editorial calendars and golden lists
Focusing on one campaign per quarter in each market.
Creating economy of scale by reusing creative and swapping out the data depending on location.
We worked with this client for 3 years, so we can’t show all the creative executions, however, we’ve picked some of our favourites to show the type of work that we carried out.
What makes a country unique is its ever changing culture and tastes. With 10 years of food ordering data available across millions of data points, we felt that telling the true story of how the great British public's tastes have changed over the years would be a great way to highlight the diversity and changing nature of our collective palettes.
The data was 10 years of customer orders cut by cuisines and location. This piece produces 50 dancing bar charts depending on the location you choose.
The creative was a dancing bar chart that shows the changing food tastes of every city in the UK. In total there are around 50 charts to view. This allowed us to legitimately contact all 50 local publications to tell them how their populations' tastes have changed over the decade.
This piece is evergreen, and constantly being pushed. To date the UK piece has had 67 pieces of coverage, 59 of which are links (Max. DR92), including a full embedded feature on the Daily Mail (biggest news site in the UK). Of the linked coverage, 88% includes anchor text with the client’s target generic term ‘takeaway’.
We wanted to drive economies of scale with our outreach across multiple countries. As the data source was the same, we knew we could easily template the design and development and then translate the data in the backend. This meant that the only additional work would be to translate and localise any copy on the front end.
This approach allowed us to deploy 5 campaigns at once in multiple countries with a very small marginal cost increase for the client.
We cleaned internal order data to isolate sweet or desert based orders by location. We then cut it by country and split it across different databases to allow us to connect it to each piece of development.
The development of this piece was quite clever. Although the base designs were all interactive maps, all of the maps were different as they were different countries.
Therefore, with the order data we transformed the locations with Python into Longitude and Latitude numbers so we could plug them into a JSON map builder that let us programmatically build different maps and populate it with order data without needed a complete redesign each time.