Netleadz helped Times Online www.timesonline.co.uk significantly increase unique visitors and reduce PPC cost through natural search engine optimisation.

Background

Times Online is part of News International Limited and the online channel for The Times and The Sunday Times. Times Online has become an important part of the groups advertising revenue generation.

Challenge

The Times had been working with a search company since September 2004 to increase their paid and natural visibility in the search engines and this was focused on the main site. Although this was going reasonably well, the overall traffic volumes were beginning to plateau and there was no real future strategy or plan in place. Times Online wanted to speed up their recruitment of online users which would in turn lead to increased online advertising revenue and resulting commercial opportunities.

Solution

After an initial appraisal we identified four key focus areas for moving their lead generation game on and satisfying objectives. These were:

Quick wins/Increased content visibility: By identifying and implementing on-site changes to pages split by commercial area, we made sure pages could be found by search engines. We enhanced the historical website content, introduced more news feeds and comprehensive site maps to make sure all information was accessible.

Inter/Intra-site linking: We expanded the inbound linking, cross-linking and external optimisation of the Times Online properties, ensuring all existing content linked to related content

Measurement/Reporting: We introduced a weekly/monthly/3 month rolling plan for ongoing lead generation work using key measurement metrics and introduced regular weekly/monthly reporting.

Training: We implemented a training programme for content editors and editorial management to demonstrate how to write for search engines and show the importance for revenue generation.

Results

The overall results were impressive over the 9 month period. Their Unique Visitors (UVs) increased by 63% in the UK and 22% Worldwide. There was a significant improvement in online advertising revenue and a reduction in Cost Per Click (CPC) rates of 38%.

PDF version