Sykes Case Study
About the Company
Sykes Holiday Cottages is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) UK national holiday provider. The only real competitor would have been the likes of Air B’n’b, but even then the target audience was slightly different.
When I joined Sykes, I was part of an already thriving SEO department that was extremely dominant in SERP. Although successful, my individual challenge was to make Sykes relevant for ‘holiday let mortgages’. The problem for Sykes is that they are not a holiday let mortgage provider, so ranking for these keywords would be extremely difficult.
I speared headed a campaign, ensuring all marketing departments were aligned, in-order to build a cohesive marketing push within the mortgage space.
3rd for Holiday Let Mortgages
After the campaign, the Sykes website ranked 3rd for ‘Holiday Let Mortgages’ and 7th for ‘Holiday Let Mortgage Comparison’.
This was a huge achievement after building relevancy towards holiday let keywords.
Unique product
The holiday let mortgage comparison tool was something that had never been seen before in the holiday let industry.
By partnering with B2B Finance, we were able to create a product that would allow both new and existing customers to re-mortgage their holiday home through Sykes.
63% visibility increase for mortgage keywords
Before I went ahead with the campaign, Sykes was struggling to gather any traction or visibility for holiday let mortgage related keywords, especially in a tough market to break into.
After the campaign, we improved our visibility for mortgage related keywords by 63%.
Partnerships and PR
To get this project going, I needed to build relevancy towards holiday let mortgages as, after all, we were not a holiday mortgage provider. Instead, to break into that pocket of the industry, we partnered with B2B Finance, acquiring backlinks from their site in various places.
This helped created business for Sykes whilst also building that relevancy that I was aiming for.
Pro-active Web Content
Outside of the holiday let mortgage campaign, I was involved in the creation of insightful guides for holiday let owners. This gave me the opportunity to create a dedicated for holiday let mortgages, building that relevancy through helpful content.
On top of this, we linked to our partnered mortgage companies whilst in return they would link to our holiday let mortgage guide section. The links were obviously done strategically and were dealt with through managed conversations with partnered representatives.
