Better - 131% Organic Search Traffic Increase

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The Challenge

The Challenge

Better Gyms have grown significantly since beginning to work with BlueGlass in 2014 – increasing from 115 sport and leisure centres to now over 250 across the UK.

Our role is to support their internal marketing team and enabling Better’s digital performance to reflect their fast-growing business plans.

Objectives

  • Acquisition of members from organic traffic – analysing analytics and PPC data, our goal was to prioritise by value to create a hyper-localised SEO strategy to build brand awareness and convert non-members to their local Better leisure centre.
  • Member retention via content – retention of existing members is hugely important and often overlooked. We ensured that each local centre was easy to find and well optimised with useful useful information and inspiring content to keep members motivated, attending and paying.
  • Increase Better’s organic market share vs key competitors – our goal was to make Better clear organic market leaders, with ambitious offline growth plans, we wanted to reflect this in the digital world.

What We Did

  • Prioritising content strategy by value – we analysed PPC data to identify and optimise for the highest converting paid search keywords.
  • Fixing technical SEO issues – we discovered a high number of duplicate content and indexing issues, which once reduced to a more manageable size helped us to ensure the quality of live pages was greatly improved.
  • Improved local SEO approach – we created a clear model to optimise for localised searches and leisure centres – building a process for future centres which were being frequently added. This included running SEO training workshops for leisure centre managers – to strengthen rankings further with the creation of unique and informative local content.
  • Content marketing to strengthen online reputation – building authoritative content, published on leading health and fitness publishers to build awareness and reputation for Better at both a brand and local level.

Results

  • Increased YoY organic traffic by 131% from 2014 to 2015
  • Strengthened Better’s share as organic market leaders in the UK leisure/gym sector
  • Won Best Use of Search in Third Sector at the 2015 UK Search Awards

'BlueGlass have played a huge role in supporting Better's aggressive growth plans - acting as an extension to our own team to help our digital marketing grow from strength to strength'

Ian Morrison, Head of Marketing & Communications at Better