How we Drove 2100+ Keywords in Top 3 Positions: Enterprise SEO Case Study of Airtel

The Challenge

1) Poor visibility in Top 3 search results for Postpaid, Prepaid and DTH related keywords

Airtel had very good presence and authority in the telecom sector. It was appearing in top 10 search results for a huge number of industry related terms and keywords, but it was not visible in the top 3 results for most of these terms. Other key players, like Vodafone and Idea Cellular were dominating the Top 3 search results for Postpaid and Prepaid products and plans. Whereas, the new entrant Jio, dominated in prepaid related searches.

For DTH, Airtel had decent presence and appeared for a number of keywords in top 10 search results. However, competitors like Dish TV, Tata Sky and Videocon and some smaller providers like DEN, captured top 3 search results for many of the keywords.

2) Low rankings for Local Keywords for Broadband and Postpaid Lines of Business (LOB)

For Broadband the presence was there in top results, but a lot of local and regional service providers like DEN, Broadway, Hathway, etc. appeared more for generic queries in different regions and completely dominated the top 3 or top 10 results in some cases, for local or regional queries.

There were similar issues with Local keywords for Postpaid.

The Solution

To get maximum keywords in top 3 search results

We pulled out a list of over 2000 keywords across all 4 Products – Postpaid, Prepaid, Broadband and DTH. We divided the keywords into 3 buckets and worked on different strategies for each:

For Bucket 1: Keywords ranking in Top 10 Results

1. We identified all keywords in Top 10 whose CTR was less than the average CTR for all keywords in the bucket. And worked on optimizing the meta titles to improve the CTR.

2. Optimized on-page SEO elements and improved content for all the target landing pages.

For Bucket 2& 3: Keywords ranking between 11-20 Results and beyond Top 20 Results

3. In addition to the on-page changes mentioned above, we also did aggressive link building to improve authority and popularity of the landing pages on which these keywords were targeted. We obtained a healthy mix of high authority links and high-quality theme-based links.

4. Worked with the Development team to improve page speed of all the target landing pages.

To improve performance of Local Keywords

• First, we pulled out the complete list of all locations or cities Airtel had their presence in or wanted to target. The target locations were different for both the products – For Postpaid, the target was 440 cities across the country. For Broadband the target was the circles (states) in country and some major cities in these circles.
• We then researches all combinations of keywords for the target cities and circles and prepared a comprehensive keywords list.
• Next we prepared separate landing pages for each of the target locations for both products.
• We did complete local optimization of all these pages including creation of Google My Business (GMB) listings for each physical outlet for each city.
• We also did comprehensive on page optimization right from content to other on page elements.
• For the newly created local pages, we built back links via off page activities to increase their authority and popularity.
• To drive more link juice to these city pages, we interlinked them to each other and also from the main product pages for Postpaid and Broadband.

The Results

Top 3 Rankings

We managed to drive an unprecedented 2100+Keywords into Top 3 position, across all 4 products, over the 12 month engagement. Only 255 keywords were in Top 3 when we started in January ’17.

For Performance of Local Keywords – Postpaid and Broadband

We managed to rank 100% of target keywords in top 10 search results i.e. over 1000 Local keywords across all target locations/cities/circles across the 2 products. This translated to a whopping 3500%increase in traffic from local queries.

NOTE: The absolute numbers are indexed, with Mar. ‘17 set equal to 2 for Organic Traffic on local pages, to facilitate the comparison of growth.

NOTE: The absolute numbers are indexed, with Mar. ‘17 set equal to 1 for Organic Traffic on Local Pages, to facilitate the comparison of growth.