For Meltwater, a leading global B2B company, content marketing is an indispensable tool for customer communication as well as in the sales funnel. It ensures that new and existing customers all over the world get access to all the key information they need with diverse content, ranging from informative articles to transactive content.
If customers have a problem or a question that can be answered in Meltwater’s website content, finding this information should be easy.
In fact, the success of the content produced and distributed by Meltwater depends very much on its visibility in the various search engines. Given the competitiveness of the market, it is essential to rank high on SERPs. And this can only be achieved with a slick SEO strategy that works.
Up until early 2020, Meltwater did not have a global SEO strategy. The different regions mostly acted independently of one another – the effects were therefore inconsistent and somewhat unreliable. Recognizing the untapped SEO potential of its markets, Meltwater (then) decided to do a full website relaunch with a view to tapping into the unexplored development opportunities that SEO can bring to organic searches.
Above all, they were looking to deliver consistent customer communication that served all its core markets and met customer requirements. The relaunch also sought to optimize overall website performance.
The Meltwater SEO Strategy
Meltwater has been using the Searchmetrics Suite as its search engine optimization software in the DACH region since 2019. Originally introduced as a pilot project, it was then rolled out in all the other regions – EMEA, AMER and APAC – when the website was relaunched starting January 2020. Meltwater now has 50 users of the various Searchmetrics Suite modules.
Meltwater’s latest SEO strategy is based on a global pillar and cluster model, which was continuously applied and optimized throughout the project.
While prior to the relaunch, the website was available in 18 languages, it now focuses on six core languages: German, English, French, Finnish, Japanese, and Chinese. Four projects were then set up in the Searchmetrics Suite – one for each of the languages: DE, EN, FR and FI, each of which were allocated the same 100 keywords and tags that are used as a benchmark for all future optimizations. Meltwater decided on these keywords because the pillar and cluster model showed them to have the biggest potential for success with the corresponding content.
Then the next step was to carry out a qualitative performance assessment by tagging all the global URLs that were part of the pillar and cluster model
Searchmetrics Research Cloud, for example, was used for keyword research, also taking into account user search intentions. It was also used as a reporting tool and for measuring results, which were then presented in the relevant dashboards. Thanks to the Searchmetrics Suite‘s integration options, they could then be forwarded directly into the corresponding Slack channels. This allowed all the teams and executives involved to be kept up to date on the project’s progress at all times.
At the start of the project, Meltwater’s global content creation workflow was gradually transferred to Searchmetrics Content Experience, The editorial experts at Meltwater then held content briefings based on the pillar and cluster structure and assigned the relevant content to team members accordingly. Existing SEO texts were then optimized or re-written from scratch.
Teams were able to watch the success of their projects unfold in Searchmetrics Search Experience. Sunburst charts were used to show to what extent the selected keywords and the corresponding tags for each project (DE, EN, FI, and FR) were already achieving the desired results. These four views could then be displayed side-by-side in dashboards, enabling progress comparisons and showing where optimization or more content might be needed
The Searchmetrics Suite helped Meltwater improve the transparency and clarity of its optimization activities globally and for all the teams involved. Automated dashboards, rather than manually created reports allowed Meltwater to see where its strategy was bearing fruit at the click of an icon. This demonstrated clearly to executives the importance of search engine optimization and the Meltwater website as drivers of organic searches.
The clear workflow within Searchmetrics Content Experience also allowed Meltwater teams to save a lot of time during the content creation process. The Searchmetrics Suite simplified internal SEO checks significantly, for example by automatically specifying how often these relevant keywords appear in searches. Meltwater’s content experts found this workflow to be particularly intuitive and helpful. The new Meltwater website has been up and running since May 2020.
Since then, the pillar and cluster model, which is constantly being improved and refined, has been applied globally. The Searchmetrics Suite has become an integral part of Meltwater’s global SEO strategy.
One of the major goals of the website relaunch project was to improve the number of leads generated. In its core regions, leads were up by 30%. One year after the relaunch, this result by far exceeds Meltwater’s expectations. In its core regions, incoming leads were up by more than 35% and counting.
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