How we used gated content to boost organic conversions by 800%
Smart Renewable Heat (SRH) was a UK-based heat pump specialist, supplying renewable heating equipment to homeowners and builders. The business was acquired by IMS Heat Pumps.
In an industry that had conventionally worked offline, SRH wanted to use digital marketing to boost interest in renewable heating, acquire new leads, and fill the sales pipeline.
The challenge was to build a site from the ground up, growing domain authority (DA) and search visibility from scratch — and do it fast. With such technically-complex products, we knew that educational content was in high demand among homeowners, and that’s why gated content formed a key part of our strategy.
The result? By combining informative blog content with link-building, we boosted rankings for long-tail terms and drove targeted traffic to downloadable guides.
SRH’s site saw spectacular growth, and conversions increased by over 800% — feeding the sales team with plenty of new prospects to get over the line.
What formed the basis for our content strategy?
Our strategy was to fight on three fronts:
Drive organic traffic by producing the very best blog content out there;
Build domain authority and page authority through shrewd link-building campaigns, and;
Create highly-relevant educational guides, and offer them as a free download.
1. Producing blog content that ranks and converts
By producing on-site blog content that solved pain points and performed in the search engines, we knew we’d attract site visitors searching for terms around renewable heating.
But with the heavy-hitting sites dominating broad terms such as heat pumps, we targeted high-intent, long-tail phrases, many of which had lower volumes and modest competition.
These included search terms such as “can I use radiators with a heat pump? “and “ground source heat pump running costs.”
In less than a year, we’d seen growth of over 1,300% in keywords reaching the top-three search positions. And that produced a 3,400% growth in organic traffic over the same period.
The key to this success? Quite simply, the content was superior to everything else out there.
More useful, more honest, more compelling, and better-tailored to what our readers really wanted to learn. The articles outperformed more established brands who were resting on their laurels.
2. Doing effective link-building and content distribution
Any domain with little-to-no authority will struggle in the search engines. So, we needed to support SRH’s on-site content by building backlinks from strong websites — in a natural way.
We took a three-pronged approach to link-building, increasing referring domains by 95% inside a year:
Guest posting: Submitting guest posts to reputable business, marketing, and green energy websites that accept guest post submissions. Original content about relevant topics.
Personal outreach: Contacting industry specialists and stakeholders at associations, organisations, and partners. Writing expert articles for the likes of YouGen, the Renewable Energy Association, EURACTIV, Green Business, LocalGov, and the UK Green Building Council.
Helping reporters: Submitting quotes on behalf of the co-founder to journalists and bloggers who would link back to the SRH root domain. We were featured on the sites of major publications, such as The Telegraph, Forbes, Metro, Daily Express, and Yahoo! News.
3. Generating leads through gated content
We don’t recommend gated content for everyone, because many businesses see better results by going straight for enquiries or signups rather than hooking prospects into an email sequence.
But for SRH, the long game made sense, because homeowners and self-builders needed to learn a lot about the new technology before making their purchase.
We matched the intent and need state for our organic search visitors to what else they wanted to learn, using the blog posts as teasers for deeper information about installing renewable heating.
Put simply: search queries give a lot away about someone’s needs, pain points, and situation. And we used this information to point them towards a downloadable guide that would help them. The contact details were then used by the sales team to reach out and have a conversation.
Key results:
Conversions (guide downloads) boosted by 800%
3,400% increase in organic traffic
1,300% increase in top-three position keywords
“KYO took our knowledge about renewables and used it to create excellent articles on behalf of our team. These pieces were published on leading industry websites”
– Marcus Franck, Marketing Director