OUTCOMES

• 652.63% increase in overall applications
• 121.59% increase in premium applications
• 115.21% growth in site visits
• 194.04% growth in search appearance
• #1 Ranking – ‘Cadetship’, ‘Maritime Cadetships’ & ‘Deck Officer Cadetships’

Chiltern Maritime are now the top result, UK-wide, for top level keywords, ahead of The Royal Navy.

CHALLENGE

For over 30 years, Chiltern Maritime, a member of the Viking Maritime Group, had remained the UK’s foremost provider of Merchant Navy Officer Cadetships. However, in recent years, the industry has seen an industry-wide downturn in cadets joining the merchant navy.

As part of Think Studio’s efforts to revitalize the Viking Maritime brand, the overall focus was to increase the flow of maritime professionals interacting with their group. Part of this group, Chiltern Maritime, wanted to focus on acquiring a higher market share of young people who were already considering joining the merchant navy. This, in turn, would deliver on their ambitions of increasing the number of applications coming through their online portal built by the Think Studio digital team.

In order to do this, Think’s campaign team worked collaboratively to explore ways to achieve this. The resulting SEO strategy was to increase organic rank for the highest volume industry-related keywords, with a view to driving the highest volume of relevant prospective applicants in the long-term.

DELIVERY

We started by identifying what their consumer profile was, based on existing information about their cadets. We then looked at which search terms were currently drawing in the highest volume of eligible traffic from the UK and EEA for both Chiltern Maritime and it’s competitors, whilst also identifying any gaps in the market that we could leverage.

Our delivery was centered around the three fundamentals of SEO:

1) On page SEO – Leveraging our keyword research and implementing them into the on-page copy and meta-information. Creating new landing pages relevant to high-volume keywords and niche searches and creating content marketing material to engage prospective applicants in the ‘consideration and information-collation’ phase of their customer journey.

2) Technical SEO – Technically optimising the site speed, implementing structured data, A/B testing creatives and using analytics to identify any friction points preventing users from performing desired actions.

3) Backlink Outreach – Building high-authority equity-passing backlinks from industry-relevant sites and partners, to build credibility.

Would you like these results for your business?

To find out how the Think Studio Campaign team can help your business increase your search engine appearance, please get in touch.