Boosting organic EV traffic for Auto Trader by 12x
With EVs now accounting for almost 20% of new car sales, Auto Trader wanted to grow its organic presence, so their team asked us to develop an online content and digital PR campaign to improve the organic performance and authority of their electric cars subfolder.
Stats
12x Organic traffic
12x
362 Placements and backlinks
362
+932 Page 1 keyword rankings
+932
Strategy
Despite its scale, Auto Trader held just a 1.86% share of voice for the top 200 EV keywords. Its electric cars subfolder lacked the authority and content needed to compete, so the team asked GAIN to develop an online content and digital PR campaign to improve the organic performance and authority of that section of the site.
Using a keyword target list provided by the client, GAIN analysed the top 50 competitors by organic share of voice and reviewed the backlink profiles of sites outranking Auto Trader. Because both Auto Trader and its competitors are large sites, the focus stayed narrow: the electric cars subfolder path.
This analysis surfaced four gaps:
- Links from trusted, high-authority domains (including .gov/.edu)
- Links from eco-friendly and sustainability-focused sites
- Insufficient link volume into the electric cars subfolder (roughly 350 referring domains needed)
- A general lack of EV content within the subfolder itself
GAIN combined this insight with content and design expertise to build six assets designed to appeal to webmasters, publishing them under the /cars/electric/ subfolder to strengthen the parent and child pages through internal linking and site structure. The team researched target domains to understand what content they already linked to and shared, then ran targeted outreach to secure placements and backlinks that would build the folder’s overall authority.
Explore the assets:
The result
The campaign delivered 12x more annual organic traffic to Auto Trader’s electric cars subfolder, an additional 1.2 million annual visits (source: Semrush) and lifted Auto Trader to the third-highest share of voice for the top 200 EV keywords, at 7.8%.
GAIN secured 362 unique placements and backlinks from referring domains, including automotive sites such as Octopus Electric Vehicles and AutoGlass Ireland, plus high-authority domains including 28 .gov links and 19 university links.
Non-branded EV keyword rankings in the top 10 grew from 45 in April 2021 to 932 by September 2022. The campaign also won Organic Search at the Drum Awards for Digital Industries 2023.
Client Testimonial
Working with GAIN on this campaign has been a delight and the results speak for themselves. It’s rare that an agency manages to understand our business so quickly and GAIN did exactly that. Their creative ideas and execution have enabled us to outperform many of the established players in the EV space.
Adam Whittles, Head of SEO & Content Marketing, Auto Trader