Royal British Legion

The challenge

Avanti West Coast, a UK train operator that specializes in offering popular rail routes such as those serving Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, found itself grappling with significant challenges. 

The launch of their website was followed by a series of train strikes and a noticeable shift in consumer preferences from train travel to car. Meanwhile, their primary competitor, an aggregator platform for train and bus travel, was surpassing them in terms of awareness-related travel content. 

The challenge was clear: the train operator needed to enhance its visibility for awareness content and persuade leisure travelers to opt for trains over cars.

The strategy

To address this challenge, Avanti worked with Croud to formulate and deliver a comprehensive SEO-led content strategy.

We started by conducting meticulous SEO research to identify knowledge gaps, scrutinize the competition's content, and delve into topic and keyword cluster research. 

This groundwork paved the way for the ideation of 100 blog post topics, carefully researched, and then ranked in priority order to come up with the top 50 blog posts, each created to resonate with Avanti’s target audience. These ideas spanned topics such as local events, travel experiences, and common travel-related questions. 

Crucially, the primary objective was to encourage leisure travelers to make the shift from cars to trains.

The content creation process consisted of generating detailed briefs for each article, specifying the ideal structure and the keywords to target. To execute this, Croud harnessed our network of expert copywriters and editors, ensuring that a reader-first approach and SEO excellence were maintained. 

The success of this task was solidified by unwavering communication between our in-house and external teams. A rigorous internal quality assurance process ensured that every article delivered value and remained reader-centric. Croud and Avanti set a deadline of one month to research, write and deliver the 50 blog posts - something that thanks to Croud’s network of global digital experts, was able to happen without sacrificing content quality.

The results

Within six days, our page showed a statistically significant uplift on page performance; reducing the bounce rate on landing and increasing e-commerce conversion rate by 7.4% for mobile homepage traffic. We rolled our redesigned page out to 100% of eligible traffic and this led to the Poppy Shop site overall generating 4.9% additional revenue during its peak Remembrance week. 

Off the back of this A/B testing, Croud are supporting the site development team to build the page and make it a permanent change to the site. We are also designing a desktop homepage based on the learnings from this test which will further optimise the homepage landing experience across all device types.