Pivoting with SEO: How Wildgoose transformed itself throughout the COVID-19 crisis

Matt Finch, SEO Manager at Distinctly, provides insight on how the team worked with events company Wildgoose to pivot rapidly in the face of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Founded in 2003, Wildgoose is a global leader in corporate occasions and group structure, winning numerous awards for the thousands of experiences it delivers across the world annually. When lockdown began, Wildgoose’s sales and pipeline took an immediate recession, with a year on year drop in sales of 62% for the month of April.

Operational expenses were tightened up together with assessments of the marketing and tech spend, and Wildgoose was forced to downsize its workforce by over 50%. The business needed to act quickly, having simply launched a brand-new website in anticipation of a record-breaking 2020.

A speedy choice was made to repurpose Wildgoose’s offering into a set of remote team building activities to link individuals virtually. This pivot would ultimately prove not only to protect the business’s instant future but to assist it thrive, and was backed up by an SEO project from Distinctly with three-month locations of focus in location.

What focus locations were targeted?

• Utilizing SEO experience to anticipate altering search keyphrases after lockdown for inquiries at the top of the conversion funnel– weekly analysis using expert SEO tools to tweak the optimization and hone phrases towards the key converting audience.
• Focus link structure activity to construct the authority and organic visibility of the brand brand-new remote team building pages.
• Driving item awareness through a skilled comment from Wildgoose founder Jonny Edser talking around the new items.

What was achieved?

The relocation has caused a general increase in organic traffic of 56% and a sales increase of 158%, since the business’s floor in April. In addition:

• 40 backlinks returned from relevant HR and service publications via linkable asset news release promo.
• Functions in Forbes, the Chartered Management Institute, and Thisismoney.co.uk.
• Wildgoose has actually seen a big spike in demand for its virtual events, with recent web traffic figures up by 54% YoY and site conversions up 158% YoY in the 3 months because launch.
• The exact same is occurring with overall earnings figures, with a boost of 180% in gross profit from April to May and 26% from May to June.
• The website is now ranking in the leading 3 search engine result for crucial traffic-driving questions consisting of “virtual team structure uk”, “virtual away day”, “virtual witch hunt”, “virtual team quiz”, “remote group building options”, “team quizzes for work” and “virtual team escape space”.
• The virtual team structure items got exceptional evaluations and an average score of 5 * on TrustPilot. This is especially important when encouraging people to enquire about a brand-new item.

How it was done: Rethinking Wildgoose’s company model

Within days of the main earnings chauffeurs effectively disappearing, Wildgoose creator Jonny Edser and the group were working on a method to secure the future of business. The service they developed indicated they might not just reshape their existing offering but benefit from the unexpected upswing in need for virtual interaction during the lockdown.

Jonny Edser says,

“By working proactively to deliver a brand name new portfolio of remote group structure activities that might be utilized to motivate employees while they worked from home, we might successfully progress in this brand-new socially-distanced world. At the exact same time, we might assist countless companies to keep their teams engaged and linked during a unsure and challenging period.

Having actually invested greatly in industry-leading innovation in the years prior– and integrated a new tech department in 2019– we found that Wildgoose had a real headstart on rivals in the market who were all attempting to change their team structure offering to something more technology-based.”

Using SEO for a successful launch

Prior to coronavirus, Wildgoose wasn’t ranking in the search results for any questions associating with “remote”, “virtual”, or “online”. With business design moving, browse presence needed to do the same, so this required to alter as soon as possible. Wildgoose’s new products were one of the very first to market, but they needed to be put in front of the right people.

Matt Finch, SEO Manager at Distinctly, says,

“The speed at which the marketplace was progressing made traditional SEO more tough than typical. We were (and still are) tweaking the optimization of the key Wildgoose pages a couple of times weekly, as brand-new data keeps showing up in Search Console. digital PR promo of the brand-new Wildgoose items were recognized as essential targets.”

Keyphrase and material optimization

People’s searching routines have actually changed considering that lockdown set in, so standard keyword research has actually needed to alter with it. Instead:

• Distinctly approached ‘guesstimating’ what people might be searching for, optimizing the crucial product pages for short-tail keywords and ‘top of the conversion funnel’ questions.
• Once these begun ranking, Google Search Console might then be utilized to see precisely what search terms were bringing users to Wildgoose’s item pages.
• The pages could then be much better optimized around these terms, becoming more targeted.
• This was inspected several times each week, representing the remarkable scenarios (normally it would be once a month to once a quarter for sites in steady verticals).
• This suggested that brand-new item and hub pages could rank highly for individuals’s brand-new search questions. Instead of targeting “team structure activities”, the website might now target and rank for specific, long-tail keywords like “remote team building services”, “virtual group structure for employees working remotely”, “virtual away days” and more.
• Speed was of the essence in the race to get ranking, as not many sites were originally targeting these questions.

Digital PR and link structure

Wildgoose’s uncommon experience of revamping its organization offering suggested there were distinct data and content that could be used in appropriate publications to promote the new items. A survey into individuals’s experiences of remote working secured protection and backlinks in over 40 HR and organization publications, allowing links and authority to be built into the new item and category pages, aiding ranking opportunities.

An efficient internal linking structure was likewise utilized, indicating pre-existing effective pages were funneling authority to the new pages to increase them even more.

MD Jonny Edser was promoted as a professional in the field of virtual group structure, resulting in features in Forbes, the Chartered Management Institute, and Thisismoney.co.uk. All of this combined to reveal Google that Wildgoose was blazing a trail in the field, and so was worthy of to rank extremely for its new target keywords and queries.

Turning Wildgoose’s fortunes around

Wildgoose is now firmly concentrated on the future, with a renewed energy around item development and brand-new gameplay formats. The company is streamlining its sales and functional processes and scaling its organization model based on updated forecasts for the months ahead. Anticipate to see more conventional team building activities made virtual over the coming months.

Matt Finch is SEO Manager at Distinctly, an award-winning search marketing firm.