Common Ground boost YoY growth by 46% for Grosvenor in Belgravia
Project Highlights
The brief
Grosvenor is an international organisation with many areas of focus, one of these being urban property investment and development. Grosvenor contacted Common Ground with a view to increasing the commercial success of over 250 of their tenants based in Belgravia.
The tenants largely consisted of restaurants, bars, retail, beauty, and fitness outlets, and were showcased on a website named Belgravia LDN, owned by Grosvenor.
Common Ground were challenged to use our digital marketing prowess to achieve two core KPIs in a campaign that would run between June 2022 and May 2023.
These were as follows:
Increase organic conversions by 30% year-over-year (from click throughs from the Belgravia LDN site to tenant websites and booking platforms).
Increase organic traffic by 40% year-over-year
These KPIs were to be achieved solely using SEO activities.
The Challenge
Our biggest challenge for this project was around reporting. The website had a new cookie policy added in February 2023 which resulted in a large decline in tracked performance across all channels.
Despite this change in tracking, Grosvenor were keen to keep the same organic KPIs in place and use an alternative method to track traffic for the rest of the campaign, if possible.
Our suggestion was to use Google Search Console (GSC) data as a guide to estimate sessions, understanding that we would lose some accuracy around other search engines. After some careful calculations and analysis, it was agreed that the process that we’d devised would be used as the method of reporting for our organic conversion and traffic KPIs.
The Solution
Our strategy was to increase brand awareness across non-brand terms, with a view to acquiring more high intent organic users to the website and driving more clicks through to the Grosvenor tenants’ profiles.
To do this we would grow existing assets, such as page one keyword rankings, by combining technical improvements and on-page optimisations.
We focused on ten pages per month, prioritised by their opportunity to drive more conversions, while also conducting competitor, engagement and intent research. A consistent approach to testing and measuring impact along the way would ensure we were on track to beat our KPIs.
Secondly, we looked to expand the target search market. We broadened our set of target keywords and content beyond ‘Belgravia’-specific terms to increase in-market traffic and tenant referrals, while continuing to defend and grow our core search visibility.
Our research revealed that we could acquire an additional 36,210 visits per month if we focused our content strategy on targeting our ideal customer profiles (ICP) across the funnel.
Lastly we wanted to leverage organic search for events and campaigns. Working with brand, paid media, and social teams, we conducted keyword research to identify target terms around the Belgravia in Bloom event.
We also reviewed the current template being used from a technical perspective, before conducting on-page optimisations across the Belgravia in Bloom section of the website, utilising the keyword research.
The results
We were delighted with the results of this campaign as we managed to exceed both of the KPIs set by Grosvenor around conversion and sessions despite a comparatively modest budget.
The production of targeted new content enabled us to increase visibility for Belgravia by 41%
within Google UK. This meant we now had 215 keywords ranked in the top 3, compared to 153 in June 2022.
Alongside the increase in visibility, we also ranked in the top 5 positions for the vast majority of our target terms which our ICP were searching for.
Our strategy took a relatively new website (1.5 years old) and drove significant growth versus our target.
This campaign brought an additional 113% of organic traffic in 2023 vs. 2022, with organic conversions increasing by 46% YoY.
The results are even more impressive considering we were competing against, and outperforming, some of the UK’s biggest destination marketing websites, such as: Tripadvisor, CN Traveller, Time Out, Open Table and Square Meal.
Our efforts have led to the website increasing brand awareness, organic visibility, traffic and conversions – delivering the best results Grosvenor and their tenants had ever seen.