The Background
Stickyeyes started working with CWT in 2017 to revamp the brand’s digital customer engagement strategy.
As part of this partnership, we tackled long-standing legacy search engine optimisation challenges and established new technical architecture to help the brand achieve its global ambitions in organic search.
We also worked with CWT on a content marketing, lead generation and marketing automation strategy, ensuring that they could reach, engage and convert key decision makers in the world of corporate travel.
A global digital transformation project
As a global corporate travel brand, CWT was a huge digital operation, engaging B2B customers and prospective customers in countries and markets around the world.
With global digital operations come unique challenges and in the case of CWT, the brand’s organic SEO visibility had been harmed by a series of legacy issues relating to domain and location migrations.
Our challenge was to tackle those core digital marketing issues and ensure they were realising their full potential from organic search, engaging and converting the right audiences, to make every click count.
Tackling core technical challenges
CWT had several core technical SEO challenges across its global web presence. Many of these were legacy issues from a previous migration, resulting in domain management, duplicate content, content relevancy and authority challenges.
The first stage of our long-term digital marketing strategy was to tackle a site migration to consolidate and redirect the brand’s URL structure, optimise the site for international markets and deploy a complete functional content strategy to improve key user experience elements.
This strategy would be supported by an ongoing programme of technical SEO and offsite outreach to build authority and enhance the brand’s organic visibility.
Migrating more than 160 international domains
Our key focus was a site migration to address the underlying issues created by previous migration attempts and consolidate all the CWT international sites under one “.com” domain. In essence, we wanted to create a “search powerhouse” which would combine the authority from those individual sites into one domain, helping the brand to become the new market leader in search.
This ‘one market, one site’ approach brought 169 separate international sites into one domain, with minimal site downtime, and resolved long-standing language tag issues to ensure that traffic was being served the most locally relevant content.
Overhauling search marketing and content strategy
Using this new technical platform, we drove forward a complete evolution of the brand’s search marketing strategy, including an extensive review of the brand’s keyword strategy, backlink profile audit and content strategy.
This process included an overhaul the site architecture, making it easier for the brand to host content for each market. We also optimised the user experience through new product pages focused on specialist products and services that were aimed at particular sectors and markets.
We also developed and deployed a new content marketing strategy, ensuring that the brand’s functional content focused on important keyword terms and user queries. We also made sure that regular content was being produced to keep users engaged with the brand.
Generating and converting leads
It was also crucial to CWT’s success that we could generate high quality, relevant leads through these digital channels. So, we developed a content-led lead generation and sales nurturing strategy to do exactly that.
We launched a series of whitepaper campaigns, designed to engage business travel planners at small and medium sized enterprises. These were promoted through paid, owned and earned media channels to drive sales leads and support the client’s sales pipeline.
These campaigns were supported by an email marketing automation strategy to keep those audiences engaged with the brand, identify the audiences’ core needs, support the client’s sales functions and push the user towards a conversion.
A partnership that works
Our business goal was to create a digital proposition globally for the travel business line of CWT. With multiple markets and websites, historically it was a challenge, that’s when we partnered with Stickyeyes as our SEO technical agency to help solve some of the legacy issues.
Stickyeyes provided full guidance and support initially with a 169-domain consolidation migration, utilizing their toolset both proprietary and third-party, enabling us to review the preproduction website prior to go-live to pre-empt any issues.
Since then, Stickyeyes has supported the CWT team on migration launches for all other business lines. Stickyeyes’ expertise, research and guidance has helped CWT transform our digital offering and the results reflect this.
Gopal Nayak, Head of IT, CWT