We put Direct Line back on page 1 for Life Insurance
Direct Line Group’s goal has always been to put the customer first.
Stats
300% growth in organic sales
300%
4 All-time high rank for Life Insurance
#4
975% Growth in organic traffic
975%
The Challenge
This began with car insurance, cutting out the middleman, the forms and the jargon – revolutionary changes at the time. Now one of the UK’s leading insurers, they also provide home, pet, travel, life, van, landlord and business insurance for millions of customers.
Attracting new policyholders is especially tough in the insurance sector. Many competitors are vying directly for attention, including powerful price comparison websites and competitors with large budgets for paid advertising. This makes achieving strong organic search rankings especially important for Direct Line. For a number of years, we partnered with them to help across various product lines, including life, pet and business insurance.
As far back as 2013, the company had been suffering from a manual penalty against the term Life Insurance, with their ranking languishing in 47th place, depressing their organic traffic and revenues. Direct Line had previously engaged a number of other agencies to solve the issue without success, so they asked us to help.
The Solution
First, we carried out a historical analysis, reviewing keyword ranking data since 2012 and aligning it with key Google updates to draw a hypothesis around the issues impacting the Life Insurance page. We also worked with the client’s development team to understand how the site had evolved and whether any technical issues were impacting performance.
As a key step in the project, we created a new, clean URL (/life-cover) to avoid legacy issues with the existing Life Insurance page.
A backlink review and cleanup of the Life Insurance folder was undertaken, followed by the rest of the site to ensure all legacy link-building issues had been addressed. We also addressed a number of technical issues, including the problems Google was having in fully rendering the page in the same way that a user would.
The Result
Given that other agencies had tried and failed to address Direct Line’s issues without success – the results were stellar.
The brand’s ranking for the term Life Insurance jumped from 48th place in 2013 to an all-time high of 4th place in 2017.
And, over a three-year period, organic traffic grew by 975% and organic policy sales by 300%, with the project delivering a 249% return on investment.
Client Testimonial
GAIN were instrumental in helping Direct Line Life Insurance brands appear on page one of Google, which benefited the business commercially. A pleasure to work with, pragmatic, with many ideas and willing to spend time to pass on knowledge.
Direct Line, Life Insurance Product Manager