British Gas Business: 'Own the podium'
Integrated paid and natural search
British Gas Business (BGB), part of Centrica, is Britain's
leading supplier of energy and energy services to businesses. The
recent growth of online price comparison sites in the business
utilities sector means that British Gas Business operates in a
market where it is easier ever before for customers to find
information about business energy, compare prices and switch
provider. BGB's challenge, therefore, is to maintain its leading
position in the face of increasing customer choice and competition
online. For 2010 their aim was to cut through competitor noise and
dominate the search results to maintain its leading position - to
'own the podium' online.
Approach
STEAK helped them achieve this by improving an already
highly successful paid search campaign and deploying aggressive
search engine optimisation tactics to raise BGB's profile in the
natural search listings and deliver traffic to the BGB
site.
Over 50 pages of new search-friendly content were created, plus
a suite of new landing pages designed to improve user journey from
the paid search results and thus improve lead conversion.
STEAK simplified the user journey, reducing what was
previously a 7 or 8 stage process down to 3 or 4, by creating
dedicated landing pages for paid search traffic around each of the
different energy types.
STEAK created 50 new pages to increase the volume of
content of the site. This helped achieve the natural search
objectives and also provided information to aid customer decision
making.
Results
The target to improve landing page conversion was exceeded
by 150%, and the core SEO metric reached six months ahead of
schedule. And, although the campaign did not have a specific target
for lead generation, a 44.4% increase in leads year-on-year was
achieved.
"It was imperative for BGB that we 'own the podium' online
in the first half of 2010. We spend the vast majority of our
marketing budget online as this channel is the core business
generator for us and search marketing is at the heart. STEAK
applied the same intelligence that had made our paid search
marketing successful to our natural search, in an integrated manner
that allowed us to 'own' the search results pages in a competitive
market and deliver brilliant improvements year-on-year
performance."
E-business Manager, British Gas Business
