London under the microscope - Staveley Head

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The Client

The Client

Staveley Head is a respected UK insurance provider. Since founding in 1991, they have steadily grown in both size and reputation, expanding their product range to include motor trade, courier and taxi insurance.

Taxi rankings in decline

Staveley Head saw a drop in rankings for the term ‘Taxi’ following the Phantom update in February/March 2017. Edit were challenged to put together a strategy to improve overall search rankings, specifically focusing on generating engagement and links around their taxi and Uber insurance offering.

Creating a mass appeal

The challenge was to create a story that appealed to the media and produce nationwide press coverage and backlinks, and also attract new and unique visitors to the site. The general cleanliness of London is often discussed, because of this, we wanted to see which is the cleanest form of transport – the Tube lines on the Underground, taxis/Uber, or London buses? Working with London Metropolitan University, we ran a study to explore the cleanliness of public transport, taking a total of 80 swabs across the capital. 121 different types of bacteria and mould were found, some potentially life threatening.

London under the microscope

To present the findings in a way which shocked and educated readers, we created an interactive asset called ‘London Under the Microscope’ which allows users to virtually explore the Tube lines, taxis, and London buses using UV using an alternative mode within the asset.This adds a dimension of interactivity as users can find the bacteria, see what kinds of bacteria were present, and find out what harm these bacteria could cause if the user were to encounter them.

The results

The campaign launched with an exclusive on the Daily Mail and Staveley Head achieved 96 pieces of press/media coverage in just over a week. So far, 18,800 people have interacted with the asset on Staveley Head’s website. In terms of organic visibility, Staveley Head’s traffic index has jumped from 7.05% to 8.68% and we’ve seen a boost in the taxi market, with 111 ranking keywords.

A month after launching the campaign, we saw a sudden increase in brand mentions for Staveley Head. The campaign started to spread again achieving an extra 25 pieces of coverage. Following our campaign, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, released a statement promising to launch a clean-up operation within the Underground in London.

  • 20,900 interactions
  • 4 minutes spent on site
  • 147% increase traffic index in the Taxi market
  • 30% increase traffic index in the Motor Trade market
  • 2 million views of the video on the BBC