Marketing Week Profiles: Latitude

atitude Group is the UKs leading independent search agency, providing search engine marketing, search engine optimisation and social media consultancy services to companies large and small throughout the UK and Europe.

lattitude10●●● Who we are… Latitude Group is the UK’s leading independent search agency, providing search engine marketing, search engine optimisation and social media consultancy services to companies large and small throughout the UK and Europe. Winner of the 2007 Net Imperative award for “Best Search Campaign”, we currently manage more than 200 paid and organic search marketing campaigns in 15 languages, targeted at internet users in the UK, continental Europe, North America and Asia.

●●● What we do… Through Latitude, brand owners have access to the very best search marketing expertise and technology (our redevelopment in 2006 of our proprietary COBRA keyword bidding platform earned Latitude Microsoft’s coveted Gold Partner status). Our search consultants are fully trained to the highest professional standards (we have more Google AdWord professionals than any other agency), with extensive working knowledge of all the major search platforms, to offer keyword generation and testing, ad copy and landing page creation and evaluation, strategic consultancy and onand off-site training.

●●● Who we work with… At Latitude we’re delighted to work with clients of all shapes and sizes, and from all commercial sectors. Larger clients like Tesco Personal Finance, Kwik Fit, Alliance & Leicester and Haven Holidays get the benefit of our fully account-managed paid and organic search services. Smaller businesses, meanwhile, can take advantage of Latitude White, our online paid search service for SMEs.

●●● Why work with us…? From the outset, Latitude has focused exclusively on search marketing. The breadth and depth of our experience in search, combined with the brightest people and the best technology, are what make Latitude the best agency choice for brand owners wanting an unrivalled return on their investment in pay-per-click search marketing and organic search engine optimisation.

 

lookers11●●● What we did for Lookers

●●● The brief and objective
Lookers Dealerships have been a client of Latitude since December 2004. The national car dealership was looking for an improvment in its number of visitors, enquiries and sales achieved through search engine optimisation (SEO). Lookers opted for the whole package – SEO work and a solid paid search service – offered by Latitude.

●●● Execution
We focused on content optimisation and the acquisition of new incoming links from other websites. As well as making changes to the site’s structure, over 20,000 words of new optimised content were added and weekly product feeds were put in place to Google’s product search feature. Together with the sourcing of many new incoming links, this strategy delivered significant improvements in natural rankings, and subsequently, the number of organic visitors.

●●● Results
Year on year, organic visits increased from 317,512 (May 2005 to April 2006) to 893,412 (May 2006 to April 2007), a massive 181% improvement. The campaign has also managed to secure very high rankings for Lookers website:

● Google number one ranking for “car dealers”, “VW dealers” and brand terms such as “Saab 93” and “Lexus is200”
● Google number two ranking for “car sales”, and brand terms such as “Renault Clio”
● Google number three ranking for “used car sales”, “car dealerships”, “Saab dealers”, “Lexus dealers” and brand terms such as “Renault Megane” and “Nissan Micra”
● Google top ten ranking for “Nissan dealers”, “Toyota dealers”, “Seat dealers”, “Honda dealers”, “Vauxhall dealers”, and many other brand terms.

Overall, visitors have been finding the Lookers site using over 35,000 different keywords each month (based on 2007). Between January to May 2007, Lookers.co.uk received over 1 million visitors and 9.5 million page views. The success of the Lookers SEO campaign is demonstrated by the fact that over 60% of these visitors were referred by organic listings on Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

Tina Ashurst, Internet sales manager, Lookers Dealerships, says: “We are very happy with the service and support Latitude has provided to date – they are knowledgeable and informative, while also being friendly and approachable. From the beginning Latitude hasn’t failed to deliver what they promised. Latitude’s explanation of how SEO works best was both put in simple terms and very enlightening. The company that provides our web design also learnt a lot from those initial discussions and they now take into account this aspect when building and updating websites.”

Latitude
55 New Oxford Street,
London, WC1A 1BS

● Chief executive, Dylan Thwaites
● Chief of operations, Richard Gregory
● Sales director, Roy Walker
● T: 0207 952 8000
● F: 020 7952 8001
● E: enquiries@latitudegroup.com
● W: www.latitudegroup.com