The Challenge
Wellers is a leading firm of accountants with offices in London, Oxford, Thame, and Banbury from where it serves the SME community. Unusually for an accountancy practice, Wellers is very sophisticated in its marketing approach. It uses HubSpot, a powerful inbound marketing CRM system. This helps it attract relevant businesses to their website and nurture them, turning many into prospects and then new clients. The capabilities of the system also ensure the firm can communicate with its clients effectively thereby helping to turn them into advocates.
The system is great and was working well – but Wellers didn’t want to rest on its laurels, it wanted to crank the handle. That meant more, good quality traffic coming into this sophisticated system. To achieve this, HubSpot suggested Wellers secure more links from relevant, quality external sites – such as online media. So, Wellers turned to Energy PR.
How We Helped
We have a good track-record deploying PR to boost a company’s brand, SEO, and web traffic performance, and quickly identified what needed to be done.
Strategy:
We recognised that Wellers has a fantastic, rich library of informative blogs on its site. These have been written by the firm’s partners and specialists, spanning an entire array of topics which are important to Wellers’ three key audiences – start-ups, growing businesses and maturing businesses.
The hundreds of blogs cover topics as wide ranging as ‘how to understand different types of share classes’, ‘how to finance business expansion’ and ‘how to protect your business idea’ through to ‘the new construction industry VAT rules’ and ‘the value of R&D tax credits’.
We used these blogs as the basis for potential feature ideas and pitched them to our many media contacts.
Focus:
Drawing on our market knowledge, we focused on highly relevant online media titles. Our criteria were that they needed to themselves have a good domain authority and cater for the elements of the SME community we are interested in; we didn’t simply want links for links sake. We wanted links that would deliver.
That meant sites which Google rates and which have genuine readers who are decisionmakers who run or manage businesses. We wanted to know that if they then went through to Wellers’ site, they would be the right kind of businesses for the firm and would therefore respond to the content they found there.
Fulfilment:
We then supplied the features, taking care to build relevant links back to Wellers site within the articles. The feature topics were carefully selected to not just appeal to readers but to provide highly tactical boosts to critical pages of the Wellers site, improving the firm’s Google page ranking for key terms, topics, and phrases. The links took the reader to different parts of the Wellers’ website, depending on what kind of business, and where ‘in the sales funnel,’ we felt a reader of such an article might be.
The links within the placed features not only delivered good quality highly relevant traffic, but because that traffic arrived at Wellers’ site from a media site where people had just read a high quality article by one of the firm’s partners, that traffic was primed. It already had confidence in Wellers’ knowledge and authority and was therefore open to glean more advice from the firm.
Lastly, the combined effect of having more, high quality links to the Wellers website, boosted the company’s overall performance in the search engines.
