The Content & Links Strategy That Outranked the UK Government

TESTIMONIAL

“Some of our team have worked in SEO for 10-15 years, but this was the best execution of link building that any of us have ever seen“

Content Marketing Manager, Valued B2B SaaS Client

WOLFGANG DIGEST

‘Making Tax Digital’ (MTD) is a UK government initiative, requiring businesses to manage their tax digitally, presenting a huge business growth opportunity for our Financial SaaS client.

Despite starting well behind our competitors, with a Content and Link Building strategy, within 6 months we doubled organic traffic for this topic and outranked our competitors, including the UK government itself.

CHANNELS

SEO-Content

BUSINESS GROWTH

Organic Traffic: +210%

Leads: +174%

Google Traffic Share: +267%

THE CHALLENGE

The UK’s switch to paperless accounting is compulsory for all businesses, meaning there’s a market of 5.5 million SMBs. However, there are >600 companies offering “MTD compatible” software, resulting in a highly competitive market.

Our client’s search presence wasn’t in a good place to capture this guaranteed burst in demand. Their biggest competitor was clearly executing an SEO strategy to gain visibility for MTD searches. Starting in February 2022, our objective was to help our client reach this audience on Google and close the gap on the competition. However, the first phase of MTD was to roll out in April 2022, giving a tight deadline to improve visibility before demand peaked.

OUR STRATEGY

Our strategy needed to educate our client’s target audience on everything to do with Making Tax Digital and making the switch to a suitable digital software.

We carried out competitor gap analysis and SERP analysis to determine where we could beat our competitors and what kinds of search terms were realistic targets. Since MTD is a government initiative, Google generally ranked the government #1.

With these insights, we built our strategy:

Strengthen organic rankings targeting less competitive long-tail questions and broader terms (to potentially double-up on visibility) with helpful content
Build high-quality backlinks to boost rankings for educational and commercial terms

INNOVATION USED

Due to significant blockers in executing important technical fixes, we made the decision to pivot to a ‘Techless SEO’ strategy, doubling down on our focus on strategic Content and Backlink efforts to achieve our goals.

We used the ‘skyscraper’ technique to identify the types of competitor content attracting authoritative backlinks in this niche, create better content and target these authoritative sites to link to our content instead. By optimising internal linking, we created a ‘trickle-down’ effect, whereby our backlinks impacted the rankings not only of our educational content but also our key commercial pages.

This meticulous process, repeated over and over proved immensely powerful and drove results fast.

BUSINESS GROWTH

Within 6 months we had grown our client’s visibility in the MTD topic space by 30%, overtaking all competitors to become the most authoritative source of MTD information on Google. Thas includes outranking the UK government for its own initiative!

We increased organic traffic by 210%, added 890 MTD keywords in top 3 positions and another 2,592 MTD keywords in page 1 positions.

The client objective here was a purely top of funnel, however, we also experienced bottom of funnel benefits as a result of our educational content strategy, driving a 174% increase in SMB leads and a 225% increase in AB leads.