VIPTickets’ Challenge
Running short of time? Click here to jump straight to the results
VIPTickets’ mission is to push the ticket industry towards a more authentic and enjoyable experience, while still maintaining high quality and a sense of trust. This is achieved by partnering with local ticket vendors, who create discounted inventory and information aiming at a genuine experience for their visitors.
We were ready to achieve their mission with our Fully Managed SEO service.
Before we begin, here’s what VIPTickets had to say about our services and the results we were able to achieve.
Rankfluence has more than tripled our SEO traffic over the past several years. We’ve increased our sales from organic leads considerably due to ranking much higher for keywords. After much searching, we finally found a SEO agency that helped scale our business – VIPTicketsCanada.ca
Rankfluence’s Solution
At Rankfluence, we like to keep our approach to SEO as simple as possible. We believe simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
The SEO campaign we carried out for VIPTickets was broken down into the following segments:
- Technical Audit: The first step of any SEO strategy should be to fully inspect, audit and review a website’s on-page architecture. Unfortunately, many SEO agencies have been known to skip this step, but it’s crucial that a website is fully optimised so that Google (and other search engines) can effortlessly crawl pages, content, and links.
- Keyword Research & Strategy: While it’s great to rank for keywords with maximum search volume, it’s not always the best return on investment. It was important we were only focusing on keywords that would result in sales for VIPTickets. These are called high buyer intent keywords.
- Content Optimisation: VIPTickets had a variety of existing blog posts, but they weren’t optimised as well as we had hoped. Our team provided easy to follow recommendations for appropriate internal links and content restructuring.
- Link Outreach: In order to really drive in powerful results, we needed to come up with a link outreach strategy that was able to land highly relevant and authoritative links consistently.
Technical SEO Audit
To begin the campaign, Rankfluence performed a comprehensive on-page and off-page audit of the site. Using a mix of custom in-house applications and leading industry software to analyse metrics and data of over 2000 pages, our team was able to focus on problematic bottlenecks and formulate solutions for them.
After conducting an extensive manual review of the site, we dug deep into data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to complete our full audit. With all the valuable data gathered, we were able to prepare a prioritised list of our top on-page recommendations.
Part of the recommendations included optimising a wide range of high-potential pages using our data-driven page optimisation analysis.
Our findings were neatly presented in a report which was delivered to VIPTickets.
All technical SEO changes were completed by our team – and this involved rewriting schema markups, fixing rel=canonical tags on category pages, identifying and cleaning up thousands of 404s, CDN migration, duplicate URL issues, Robots.txt optimisation and many more.
This is another reason why technical SEO is of great value and should not be underlooked.
It’s crucial that the technical architecture of a site is optimised correctly so that any external work carried out (link building) will perform exceptionally well.
With no bottlenecks and problems with the site’s architecture, VIPTickets was ready to witness growth in organic visibility as we progressed into their SEO campaign.
Keyword Research & Strategy
Working together, VIPTickets and Rankfluence produced and agreed on an SEO road map and strategy to identify and rank for major Canadian NHL team search phrases.
These phrases had a high buyer and commercial intent. This meant anyone searching for these keywords was looking to find out further details in order to ultimately commit to a purchase.
Note: Although Ahrefs provide a solid piece of kit for keyword research and analysis, their “Keyword difficulty” scores are flawed in the below screenshots. The leading competitors in this industry were billion dollar companies/organisations such as Ticketmaster and NHL, so they were able to rank in higher positions solely based on their domain authority and brand power.
As well as identifying high buyer intent keywords of major Canadian NHL teams, we also executed an additional keyword research strategy that would allow us to achieve quicker results.
Our Fully Managed SEO campaigns can take a minimum of 6 months before you start to notice significant growth in organic visibility. We know not everyone is a fan of waiting – so a strategy we sometimes like to consider is picking keywords that a site is already ranking for on Pages 2 and 3. These are also commonly referred to as the “low-hanging fruit” keywords.
Targeting low-hanging fruit keywords gives you the opportunity to attract increased traffic with less effort.
For example, the keywords ranking on the second page of Google are usually full of potential, making them an easier target to focus on to achieve fairly quick improvement. Instead of waiting 6 months for initial noticeable growth, targeting low-hanging fruit keywords can result in quick wins in a shorter space of time (3-4 months).
This is not always the case though – so for the best results, it’s important to carry out a further layer of filtering on low-hanging fruit keywords so that you’re only focusing on the search phrases that will contribute to your final goal.
In VIPTickets’ case, it was essential that we were only concentrating on keywords with buyer intent.
The beauty with low-hanging fruit keywords is the fact that you don’t need to go to extreme efforts in order to see improvements. Since they’re already ranking in somewhat decent positions, you can follow a few simple (and completely free) techniques in order to boost their search positions.
Using the above example in the screenshot, if one of the low-hanging fruit keywords was “Leafs Tickets”, you could consider:
- Adding a suitable section/paragraph for this keyword on the target page. This could be as little as 100 words. The purpose behind this is to better signal to Google that the page has content that is topically connected to the keyword.
- Adding related keywords on the target page. In some cases, you may have several mentions of the low-hanging fruit keyword on your page already. In such instances, it wouldn’t be smart to add more mentions of this keyword as you could run into trouble with over-optimisation issues. Instead, think about adding related phrases that have contextual relevance to the main low-hanging fruit keyword.
- Building internal links to the target page. Building internal links means finding relevant pages on your site (or even pages on your site where there is a mention of the low-hanging fruit keyword) and linking those keywords to the target page. Search engines such as Google will crawl these internal links and will be able to establish the topical relevance between content. Another tip is to add internal links on pages with the most backlinks. Since these pages already have authority, an internal link would carry more weight to your target page. And most importantly, don’t overdo it. Be considerate with internal links, ensuring you’re only placing them in relevant and appropriate content.
Competitor Analysis
A key part of our SEO strategy was a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the top competitors.
Your competitors can provide you with invaluable information and data that you can use to your benefit. For example, by carrying out SEO competitor analysis, you can find out:
- Exactly what seems to be working in your niche
- Competitor’s strengths (so you can copy them)
- Competitor’s weaknesses (so you can exploit them)
- Competitor’s link building efforts and history
- Content gaps between top competitors
Content gap analysis is an effective method to find keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t.
By going through these keywords, you can determine whether or not they are suitable to add to your SEO strategy. Are the keywords relevant? Do they satisfy the user-intent you’re targeting (informational, transactional, etc)? Do the keywords have enough search volume?
Link Outreach
By executing a targeted and out of the box outreach campaign, powerful connections were created with industry influencers.
Although we developed various creative link building strategies for VIPTickets’ SEO campaign, the key tactic we used was outreach.
Outreach is where you – politely – reach out to relevant webmasters and bloggers in your niche and introduce them to your website.
However, it isn’t as easy as it sounds.
With an increasing number of SEOs and agencies frequently outreaching to hundreds and thousands of sites, there is massive competition for links.
In order to improve your success rate when doing link outreach, we recommend crafting content assets that webmasters would love to link to. These could be a long-form content piece that explains a particular subject in detail (such as a pillar page) or even an engaging and interactive infographic asset. The key is to ensure the content asset is educational, fun and worthy of being linked to. If you tick all these boxes, you’ll have a high-quality linkable asset that will earn you links almost too easily.
Currently, our top performing linkable asset is an animated infographic. Rankfluence specialises in creating gorgeous and beautifully designed animated infographics at budget-friendly prices (most corporate agencies charge between $3,500 – $7,500). Take a look at one of our recent samples below and for more information, visit our Infographic Assets service.
Attention to detail and an innovative outreach campaign allowed VIPTickets to obtain insanely difficult-to-get links within months (a mix of guest posts and link placements).
The Results
Since our partnership began, Rankfluence has helped VIPTickets boost its organic visibility significantly.
To be exact, we’ve assisted them in achieving a more than 1000% organic search traffic over the course of 3 years.
They now rank for a total of 15,000+ keywords, with approx:
The majority of these keywords also have high buyer intent (“Canucks Tickets”, “Leafs Tickets”, “Concert Tickets” and much more). By focusing on commercial keywords like these, we were able to drive explosive growth in revenue for VIPTickets.
Traffic continues to climb, initially at an average rate of 5% per month, and now at a continuing growth rate of 10-15% per month, resulting in over 45,000 organic monthly visitors.
If you’re interested in achieving similar results, why not take a look at our services? Or if you have any questions, please send us a message and we’d be happy to help! ☺️
