2x Organic Traffic Growth for Hitched

Hitched is the UK’s leading wedding services marketplace, supplying hundreds of thousands of wedding leads to the industry each year. Hitched is also the UK’s largest wedding planning website, giving couples the tools they need to find and book premier venues and suppliers.

Challenge

When Barry Magennis was put on the case at Hitched, the company was facing three major challenges.

1. A decline in organic traffic. Facing declining organic search traffic and new entrants to the market it was important that Hitched solidified its leading market position to continue providing the best leads to wedding businesses.
2. No clear ‘Pay Per Click’ strategy. The PPC budget was divided across a selection of keywords which, while wedding related, were not targeting the audiences that were most likely to generate leads for wedding vendors.
3. An underperforming SEO agency. Hitched had been working with another SEO agency for some time, but had not seen the results needed to grow traffic or leads.

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"Approachable, smart, Barry immerses himself in markets to really understand customer behaviour, which leads to excellent results."

Matthew Gerry, Hitched

Solution

With no single, clear explanation for their problems,Hitched needed a highly experienced SEO consultant to put their business back on track. The company also wanted to drive future growth, in order to avoid slipping back into this position. Hitched needed audience development expertise, and they needed it fast. With a decade of SEO experience, Barry is not fazed by complex, challenging projects, focusing on problem solving and increasing growth.

Barry spoke with the Hitched team, to fully understand the business and its users; their behaviours, their motivations, their pain points and their attributes. As so many of the UK’s major wedding suppliers and premier wedding venues use hitched to advertise their services, it was important to understand what would appeal to their target audience and influence their decision making. He also reviewed the company’s website’s performance, before devising a new marketing strategy that was data driven, intelligent, actionable and would provide results.

1. Barry performed an extensive keyword research, to find relevant keywords that Hitched were not ranking in Google for. This provided the keyword intelligence needed to create new content pages– over time, these would ultimately increase web traffic and generate wedding leads.
2. He then made an analysis of current keywords, before adding additional, relevant search terms to the list. This information helped Hitched to optimise content that was underperforming, along with increasing the number of keywords this content would rank for.
3. As well as equipping them with a new, data-led content strategy, Barry coached the editorial team in SEO best practices and helped them apply these to new and existing content.
4. Barry also began carrying out a monthly technical SEO analysis, finding and resolving hundreds of issues. Barry worked with the website development team to resolve these issues.
5. He audited the Google Ads account, and then implemented new geo-targeted ad campaigns, aimed at providing the most valuable traffic at the lowest possible cost.
6. Barry implemented an intelligent Facebook advertising strategy. Through the power of design and data, coupled with multivariate testing of images, messaging and audiences, Barry delivered engaging campaigns which delivered strong ROI’s.

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"Barry is a dedicated, knowledgeable SEO and experiencedPay Per Click marketer. He cares deeply about success."

Matthew Gerry, Hitched

Results

1. Over 300 technical SEO issues were uncovered and fixed.
2. Organic traffic increased from 650K to over 1.2 million unique visitors, per month.
3. PPC advertising, through Google Ads, generated thousands of additional leads per month. Cost-per-click was reduced by over 50%.
4. Leads from Facebook and Instagram became an integral part of the company’s growth strategy.
5. Wedding leads from SEO and paid traffic increased by more than 25%. That’s thousands of extra wedding leads per month.
6. PPC now delivers over £100 million worth of wedding venue leads each year.

"Barry isn’t just a marketing specialist. He focuses on understanding customer desires, motivations and behaviours. He has helped improve our SEO enormously, and run PPC campaigns effectively, but behind that is the time he has taken to get that critical understanding, which sets him apart."

Matthew Gerry, Hitched

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