OVERVIEW

As an essential retailer during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, Halfords in-store activity saw an influx of national interest as consumers invested in cycling and motoring.

In this time Halfords’ digital presence gained inflated levels of organic traffic driven by increased demand. With restrictions easing from August 2020, it became essential to develop a sustainable SEO strategy that capitalised on renewed interest, maintained visibility, and ensured the brand owned share of voice in key strategic markets of kids bikes and scooters.

Our solution

Our strategy was an end-to-end campaign of SEO activity covering:

  • Technical SEO
  • Onsite content optimisation
  • Informational content auditing, optimisation, and writing
  • Linkbuilding
  • Digital PR linkbuilding for two key target categories

This resulted in an 8 month consistent range of activity including the following:

  • Over 120 complete content re-writes and 400+ improvements to internal linking and meta data across a range of categories including motoring, kids bikes, cycling and electric scooters
  • 55 site tickets raised in response to a thorough technical audit from improvements to schema, site speed (e.g. resource usage, image sizing, JavaScript / CSS usage), canonical usage, content placement / duplication, internal linking, subdomain handling.
  • 13 action points highlighting the biggest gaps in performance against each Core Web Vitals metrics ahead of the Page Experience Algorithm.
  • Launched Imagination Station, an influencer-led campaign that anchored Halfords’ role in helping parents keep kids active, creative, and engaged during lockdown.
  • Launched ‘Planet E-Scooter’ an interactive tool that would contextualise and inform on electric scooter law across the world, further highlighting the UK’s outlier stance to electric scooter usage and legislation. The campaign complemented Halfords’ ongoing government lobbying efforts to legalise electric scooters following a series of regional trial initiatives.
Halfords Case Study

Results

  • Our linkbuilding and digital PR activity built 36 links from targeted, high-quality sites including the BBC, The Express, Road CC and Transport for London.
  • Comparing Aug2020-Mar2021 YoY, whilst impressions returned to pre-Covid levels, improved positions and stronger CTR resulted in an 84% increase in non-brand clicks.
  • Increased first place positions by 48% YoY
  • Drove 21 million additional organic sessions! A 61% increase YoY
  • Increased organic revenue by 114% YoY

The activity has resulted in an award nomination for Best SEO Campaign at Northern Digital Awards 2022.

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