Aford Awards | Reflect Digital
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“Reflect Digital’s expertise has helped us get to a new level. Their ability to understand and analyse our business is refreshing and our company has grown so much thanks to an amazing and forward-thinking SEO strategy. Reflect have hit all the ambitious targets I put in place and I could not be happier”.

JON FORD – MANAGING DIRECTOR

The Brief

Aford Awards are one of the leading trophy, medal and engraving specialists in the UK, selling a wide range of sporting and corporate trophies. 

They have seen steady year on year online revenue growth for the last 4 years, but they wanted us to help them push this further.

The brief for the Reflect Digital team was set around some overall objectives for a 2018 campaign: 

  • Increase brand awareness by creating engaging content to help position Aford Awards as the number one trophy specialist in the UK

  • —Grow year on year organic traffic by 75%

  • —Increase website conversion rate

  • —Achieve 50% year on year revenue growth 

 

Our Solution

This campaign combined innovative thinking both technically and creatively to deliver outstanding results in a highly competitive industry. 

As with any successful SEO campaign, you can create the most innovative, cutting-edge campaign but if the core foundations aren’t solid then the campaign will never reach its full potential. We knew that with this SEO campaign we wanted to demonstrate a truly holistic approach to delivering ROI from organic search. 

The campaign was developed taking into account technical website optimisation, user-focused on-page content development, conversion rate optimisation (CRO), page speed optimisation and innovative content marketing pieces designed to earn natural high-quality backlinks. 

We built out a plan that prioritised development of content for new and existing categories based on search volumes, user intent, strength of competition and current ranking position. We then planned in regular technical reviews across the campaign to ensure that foundational and advanced technical SEO factors were being worked on regularly to support effective crawling and indexing, ranking improvements and improved usability.

We also created a content calendar to develop link-worthy content in-line with annual events such as major golf tournaments and the World Cup. 

Understanding what are “SEO best practices” is easy but putting them into action to deliver meaningful business improvement is another thing. We focused on measurement throughout the campaign to push the boundaries and understand the real impact of our optimisation work and utilised a real world, data lead approach to continually optimise website performance, improve rankings, click-through rates (CTRs) and conversation rates. 

In order to earn quality, natural and relevant backlinks to the Aford Awards website we needed to create a variety of innovative content marketing campaigns. These included: 

  • The development of the World’s most expensive trophy. Up until this year, the World’s most expensive trophy was the World Cup which is valued at $20 million dollars. The Aford Awards Fortune 40 Trophy we created is a 28-inch tall Silver trophy encrusted with 2,200 1ct diamonds and a 1.54ct ruby valued at £27 million pounds.
  • Developing relationships with Premiership clubs such as Liverpool, Spurs and Wolves to design trophy history infographics to be published on their social sites or leading fan websites.
  • Engaging image-based quiz content for users to “guess the football trophy”.
  • Creating topical infographics such as ‘Manchester City: Record breakers’ to gain coverage from football related sites.
  • Writing relevant ‘link bait’ articles such as 'which footballer has the most trophies’ to increase the topical content on the website.

We carried out advanced page speed optimisation including image optimisation, browser caching, minifying JavaScript, HTML and CSS and server compression. Being a Magento website, which can be inherently slow, there were additional code and server response optimisations needed to ensure we achieved our target of under 2 second load time. We achieved an average page load time across home-page, category listings and product pages of 1.5 seconds. This site speed optimisation work helped improve ranking positions, reduce bounce rate and improve the user experience. 

Campaign Highlights

The Results

Organic revenue has continued to increase month on month throughout 2018 with May and June being the record months with the highest revenue ever achieved. 

The SERPs CTR optimisation work was done in stages to identify the impact of our changes. The most significant improvements came from the addition of review Schema markup and the inclusion of stars in the SERPs - This delivered an increase of 18% CTR across main category landing pages.
Alongside this organic traffic, sessions have more than doubled (increase by 120.17%) comparing the first half of 2018 with the same time period in 2017.

Overall when comparing Year on Year, we achieved a successful 148% increase in transactions, which resulted in a 116.02% increase in revenue, and dramatically boosted brand awareness with the Campaign being featured by; The Sun, Liverpool FC, BBC Radio, Talksport, and the Huffpost. 

We're thrilled to announce that the work we've done at Reflect Digital with Aford Awards has been nominated for the 'Best Use of Search' by Wirehive 100 awards 2018.

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