Bringing the hidden hero into the light

Brief

You would be forgiven for not knowing exactly what a thermal fluid is or exactly what it does. However, the manufacturing industry has a lot to thank them for.  From food processing, pharmaceutical production and PET plants, thermal fluids have almost certainly been involved in most of the products you use day to day — pretty cool, right?

Global Heat Transfer (GHT) is an international thermocare and thermal fluid distributor based in Cold Meece, Staffordshire — the irony. It operates globally and has recently opened distribution centres and sales officers in Dubai, Chicago and Singapore.  Despite its growing international success, GHT had low website conversion and retention across all of these territories, which did nothing to boost awareness of the business and its product.

This is where Stone Junction stepped in. Tasked with increasing its online visibility through proper website management and SEO, Stone Junction set to work turning up the heat for GHT.

Objectives 

• Increase the average time spent on the GHT website from 51 seconds to one minute. 
• Increase domain authority of 17 (Steptmeber 2018) to 20 by May 2019. 
• Improve the quality of GHT website traffic by increasing sales leads by 10 per cent.

Research and planning

We knew that in order to appease Google’s algorithm and therefore boost site visibility we had to improve the quality and quantity of GHT’s web copy.

Google’s recent ‘panda’ analytics update aimed to discriminate against webpages that have both a low Quality Score and/or thin content. Thin content is defined as any web copy that is either a doorway page, affiliate page or is lacking in both quantity — less than 200 words — and reader value.

After our first audit we determined that GHT was a hotbed of thin content. The only way to rectify this was to rewrite the entire website copy; from the landing page down to the tooltips. Our aim was to create informative and thought-provoking content that appealed to the better nature of the panda algorithm.

Having worked with GHT since 2012, understanding their tone of voice and technicalities was as easy as riding a thermal fluid bicycle — we hadn’t forgotten how.

"We felt confident Stone Junction had the technical expertise that would enable them to communicate our message effectively. Often, it's difficult to find an agency that understands the challenges a specialist engineering company presents, but the team at Stone Junction has the experience, knowledge and approach that will allow them to tackle this technical market and simplify complex issues."

Caroline law, head of marketing, global heat transfer 

Strategy and tactics

The final campaign was split into five sections

• Training: We attended an in-depth GHT training session with the company’s managing director — thanks Clive — which highlighted exactly what was needed to improve the SERP ranking without damaging the customer journey.  
• Planning: A plan was formulated on how best to tackle GHT’s, 258 site issues. We chose to rewrite and optimise ten core key landing pages in order to boost our organic search ranking 
• Content writing: Using SEMrush to establish correct title tags, ALT attributes, H1/2 tags, image tags and keywords we began to write our content; staggering the upload between October 2018 and May 2019. 
• Improving website health — cough, cough: We slowly began correcting all 258 site issues that we had established, starting with the most SEO damaging — 155 pages of detrimental bugs and fixes. 
• Media Distribution: In order to build domain authority, we aimed to create targeted online content to appear on preferential backlinks websites.

Most websites are optimised purely for aesthetics, but for GHT we considered what the visitor actually wants — informative copy. Here at Stone Junction, we specialise in technically accurate content, so in order to best utilise our skill base we proposed that each webpage be structured as if it were a trade article for press. 

Implementation

We began with the new web copy. Using the aforementioned training we delivered vibrant, technical and intriguing copy — if we don’t say so ourselves — across all major landing pages.  The content positioned GHT as a consultative expert in thermal fluids, reassuring consumers that they were making an enquiry with a trusted source.

We then peppered the copy with both core and semantically related keywords that we had established as part of our research — thermal fluid, thermal oil, heat transfer fluid, heat transfer oil and HTF. Although initially GHT ranked poorly for all five of its chosen keywords, through manipulation of ten main landing pages we slowly began to optimise.

Once the copy was complete, we began to fix all 258 issues that had been identified by Moz earlier on in the campaign. 155 pages had missing meta descriptions, 58 had lengthy URLS, there were missing H1 tags, protracted titles, duplicate content and 18 4xx errors. We prioritized the issues that were of the biggest detriment to GHT’s web health and by May 2019, all of these bugs had been fixed.

"We started working Stone Junction in March 2012. They have since significantly rasied our profile in a number of key areas against our objectives. Another key objective was to understand that marketing for manufacteruers could deliver sales opportunities and we did receive direct sales enquiries thanks to coverage in key trade publications. We received coverage in national newspapers as a result of their rapid response work and Stone Junction has helped us develop relationships with key trade media in our industry 

clive jones, managing director of ght and ceo of the global group of companies

Measurement and Evaluation

From September 2018 to May 2019, GHT received 52 international enquiries from the site – an increase of 30 per cent from the previous nine-month period. The value of these inquiries also moved forward by 24 per cent. Throughout the campaign GHT also received £39.2 million of sale enquires specifically from the website — an increase of 30 per cent from the previous period.

Our media relations campaign generated 46 highly targeted pieces of coverage, the majority of which were online, sharing a readership of 3.3m and 31.3K estimated coverage views, according to CoverageBook.

All of this success helped us reach our objectives.

Objectives revisited: 

• Average time on site moved from 51 seconds to one minute and 14 seconds – target exceeded by 23 per cent.
• Domain authority increased from 17 to 23 by May 2019 – target exceeded by 100 per cent
• We generated £39.2 million of sales leads from the website — our 10 per cent sales lead increase target was exceeded by 240 per cent.

For every £1 spent, Global Heat Transfer received £3,452 of leads.

Marketing for manufacturers isn't always easy, but with Stone Junction at the helm, it can be! Call us now on +44 (0)1785225416 or email sayhello@stonejunction.co.uk