Objectives

• As one of the leading beer brands in the UK, Carling needs its offline reputation to be reflected in the digital sphere, so a consistently high ranking in search engines is vital.
• Fast Web Media was tasked with ensuring Carling ranked highly for beer and alcohol related terms as well as terms relating to their sponsorship interests, such as the Carling Cup and the Isle of Wight festival.
• We were also asked to expose the brand to the relevant audience through the promotion of music and football related content.

Strategy

• Ongoing on-site optimisation was put in place, including rewriting of meta data, content creation, code optimisation, and crawlability testing, all based on the latest SEO requirements.
• Pro-active and reactive PPC was used to drive low-cost but highly relevant traffic to the brand site, resulting in high engagement levels and conversions.
• We carried out linkbuilding activity in a way that conforms to the alcohol marketing regulations. Existing relationships through sponsorship were leveraged to achieve maximum SEO benefit.
• Multi-variate testing allowed Carling.com to reduce their bounce rate and increase the conversion of the website.

Results

• Carling.com received over 13 million visits between June 2008 and June 2011. 10 million of these visits were unique.
• 62.48% of overall traffic came from search, with 17.04 being from direct traffic.
• Carling ranks first for keywords such as ‘Manchester Apollo’ and ‘Carling Cup’ with those terms generating over 362,000 and 764,000 visits respectively.
• Carling also ranks in the top five for the keywords ‘Hammersmith Apollo’, ‘Apollo Manchester’ and ‘League Cup’, further fostering the association between the brand and music and football.