SEO Case Study #3

 

SACO Apartments, starting from its base in Bristol, pioneered serviced apartments in the UK and is now the UK’s largest provider with properties in 30 UK cities including nine in London.  

Serviced apartments are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to hotels because they typically offer separate living and sleeping spaces, fully equipped kitchens and the comforts of home.  With the convenience of city centre locations they serve the corporate and leisure markets.

Challenges and goals

SACO was looking for a partner to outsource the responsibility for optimising and running cost effective internet marketing campaigns. The purpose being to generate room bookings worldwide with particular focus on its serviced apartments in London, Bath and Manchester.

SACO had used a large London-based agency previously and was looking for a local agency to provide a more tailored and pro-active service that worked to the same goals as SACO.

The solution

WSI launched search engine advertising ‘pay per click’ campaigns using its proprietary WSI Adworks platform. 

This offered highly-efficient realtime automated bidding across the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.  A high percentage of SACO’s bookings are made via the call centre so the ability of WSI Adworks to record and capture these leads is a vital element of the campaign optimisation and cost effective lead generation.

Using the data from the paid advertising campaigns, WSI embarked on a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign to boost SACO’s website ranking for the highest traffic keywords.

Results

After 12 months  of optimisation the ‘pay per click’ campaign was generating double the target number of qualified leads at cost per lead 35% below the target.

After 9 months of SEO, SACO was ranked on Page 1 of Google for all of its highly competitive keywords with many of them of them in the Top 3 positions.  This resulted in organic traffic to the website growing by between 50% and 400% depending on the keyword.

So what does the client think?

'Since moving to WSI from a larger London-based agency, we have seen a major shift in the performance of our SEO and PPC campaigns and the level of service we receive.

'We put a strict ROI target in place and WSI immediately established a plan to help deliver the results we needed. The level of service we receive from WSI has been excellent, with accurate and insightful reporting and proactive changes to underperforming campaigns and keywords.

'Throughout the process, communication has been excellent and we have always felt like we are a valued client.'  

Matt Edwards, Marketing Manager, SACO Apartments