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Note: due to our contracts, the client related to this case study must be anonymous. However, if you have any questions inspired by this document, please contact us at info@greenlanemarketing.com.
Conducting a competitor gap analysis can pay off in big ways. The Greenlane team identified an area of opportunity for a large soccer website, resulting in over 41,000 pageviews in just the first five months.
The Challenge
The Greenlane team was tasked with creating fresh and engaging, comprehensive and valuable soccer content in an already competitive search landscape.
The Goal
One of the client’s main goals was to find new areas of opportunity to grow their platform and reach a wider audience through new content.
The Strategy
Our gap analysis revealed that competitors see success through team-specific schedules and club landing pages. The common thread is that these competitors all provide a landing page to capture visibility for these team-specific queries.
Our client created similar pages to compete based on Greenlane’s extensive competitive research and optimizations provided within content briefs. Some of the more impactful tactics in the briefs included:
- Search intent
- Competitor URLs
- Top keywords/concepts from organic search
- “People Also Ask” results from Google SERPs
- Meta tag recommendations, including the title, description, and URL structure
- SEO-optimized H1 title
- Unique, SEO-optimized H2 headings
In addition, the Greenlane team offered content recommendations to include within each text section under each heading. We formed recommendations based on the content our top competitors had, while aiming to go above and beyond and craft optimal content to rank. The information included each club’s schedule, where to watch matches on television, links to streaming services, player lineup, match predictions, news and more.
The Results
Our client took our content briefs and ran with them, ultimately creating 15 brand new landing pages revolving around club schedules. We saw the following improvements for pageviews and keyword rankings:
- Incremental lift of 41,000 pageviews
- 33% increase sitewide in pageviews since the launch of the new topic pages
- 1,300 new keywords ranking on the new landing pages
- First page visibility for competitive keywords with high search volume
The Liverpool club page itself saw 12,500 views from all users, with 10,100 of those views from organic traffic alone. The Manchester club page saw 7,700 views from all users; 7,000 from organic traffic. Best of all, the pageviews for the new club pages continue to climb:
Queries tied to the club pages earned a grand total of 11,879 clicks and 2,510,032 impressions since their inception, with 1,737 goal completions. That comes out to be a 14.6% conversion rate from our new pages’ keywords!
The graph below represents ranking fluctuation among several different pages. After creating the Liverpool club page, the competitive keyword “liverpool schedule” (45,000 monthly searches) steadily ranks on the club page alone and ranks higher than ever.
Similarly, our keyword “chelsea tv schedule” originally ranked in position 4 on a less-targeted page, yet with the creation of our new page, it has now jumped to position 2.
If you are also interested in gaining visibility within your industry, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Contact us today to see how Greenlane can improve your keyword rankings and help your business grow.
*All data points are from January 1-May 31, 2022.
