To say we were a little taken aback by this award win is an understatement, and although good old British bashfulness will tell us we should keep this humble, we say sod it… let’s say this how it really is.
The team at Hot House Digital are over the moon to have won ‘Best Search Marketing Campaign’ at the Prolific North Marketing Awards 2024 at Old Trafford Stadium in Manchester on 31st October. As a small agency, it’s an honour to see our work recognised in this way, especially as the win is in recognition of our search campaign work and the tripling of revenue through organic search for one of our most brilliant clients (all our clients are brilliant in their own way), TOG24.
There were undoubtedly a tonne of excellent entries for this award, all of which will have used SEO strategies to get to their goal, so for ours to be handpicked as the standout is a huge achievement.
Here’s a look at how we approached our award-winning search campaign…
A bit about TOG24’s SEO objective…
TOG24 are a brand rightfully proud of their Yorkshire roots and the high-quality yet affordable clothing they offer. Their SEO objective: Make organic search a key revenue driver for their business.
Their flagship products, like coats, fleeces and gilets, were popular but needed better visibility online, so we developed a plan that focused on technical SEO, supported by well written and well-optimised content and digital PR, all tailored to make sure their site could perform at its best.
Our SEO approach:
We started by ensuring the technical foundations were right. For instance, our initial audit revealed that large image files were slowing things down, so the in-house team at TOG24 collaborated with an image compression specialist organisation to shrink image size considerably. That improved the site’s load time significantly, which boosted both the user experience and TOG24’s rankings. Additionally, we fixed hundreds of broken links and cleaned up errors across the site. Small changes, big impact.
On-page SEO:
Next, we identified new on-page opportunities. Using a custom tool we developed, we pinpointed internal linking opportunities, boosting page authority for core products and driving up their rankings. We also created over 300 new pages tailored to more complex, long-tail keywords (e.g, “women’s long winter coat”) to capture highly relevant search traffic. By addressing specific search intents, these pages improved TOG24’s reach and brought new visitors straight to the products they were searching for.
Content strategy:
Google’s EEAT principles and emphasis on “helpful” content, although phrased cryptically, reinforce what our extensive experience has shown us time and time again: quality, original content is a huge driver of success. We’ve seen firsthand that investing in well-crafted content has a significant impact on rankings and ultimately helps achieve the goal that drives most sites to rank in the first place – generating more revenue. With that in mind, we put serious effort into creating content that delivers. Through extensive keyword research, we developed a content plan of 24 blog posts focused on useful and engaging topics, each offering excellent internal linking opportunities.
One of the best things about TOG24 is that they know who they are as a brand, and that light-hearted, friendly outdoorsy vibe was an absolute pleasure to work with, so the “TogBlogs’ – as well as helping with their rankings – also reinforced their strong brand identity.
Digital PR and backlink building:
Finally, we created digital PR campaigns that resonated with TOG24’s values, like their love of pets and healthy lifestyles, as well as their focus on sustainability. Each project helped build their backlink profile and increase visibility in the media.
And now for the results…
According to the judges, we won this award based on how we went about the search campaign and the results we got.
Over the past year, TOG24’s organic search revenue has more than tripled, increasing by 200%. The number of target keywords in the top three positions rose by 275%, with keywords ranked between positions four and ten up by 235%. Non-branded keywords performed especially well, with a 488% increase in first-page placements, giving TOG24 strong visibility for generic terms like “men’s coat,” “women’s gilets,” and “men’s fleeces.” For these high-competition keywords, TOG24 climbed from lower ranks to top positions, even reaching #1 for “women’s gilets” and “men’s fleeces,” surpassing major competitors.
We absolutely adore working with TOG24, and this award is as much down to their commitment to SEO as it is ours.
Things are hotting up…
From the start of 2024 to now, the Hot House Digital team has doubled in size with 8 full-time specialists owning their departments. We’ve just moved into a bigger office in the centre of Leeds, and now, with this award under our belt, and an exciting prospective client list, we’re all psyched to make big waves in 2025…plus, to celebrate, we thought we’d go all out and buy that office coffee machine we’d been banging on about!
If you’re looking to get much better results from your SEO efforts in 2025 by partnering with an agency who knows what they’re doing, we should chat. Contact Patrick on patrick.rose@hothousedigital.co.uk.
