Muval SEO – Marketplace SEO Case Study Growth Study

The Problem

Muval is a national removalists marketplace. When Muval engaged Prosperity Media, they had great visibility on interstate removalists keywords (i.e. “Sydney to Melbourne removalists”) however they could not rank competitively for city-based keywords (i.e. “Sydney removalists”), due to interstate pages taking precedence. 

Additionally, both Muval’s city and interstate pages were ranking for city-based keywords, causing potential keyword “cannibalisation” issues. We were tasked with solving the issue of improving the city rankings, without compromising the interstate rankings.

The Solution

This campaign involved a combination of technical, onsite and offsite SEO tactics to form a comprehensive strategy. 

We prioritised onsite changes to make it easier for SE crawlers to understand the site structure and the intent of each city page. This involved technical fixes such as improving semantic HTML markup and best practices fixes for optimal crawling and indexing.

In regards to onsite content, we discovered that the local pages had duplicate content issues due to a programmatic, templated approach to content/page publishing.

Muvals campaign also involved a content campaign to help position them as the Authority on all things moving. By using existing content, and covering gaps with new content, we built out a Moving House section, which provides resources and guides users through the entire moving process. This saw Muval gain significant visibility across “moving” related search terms.

To help build Muvals authority in the local markets, we also created a series of blog articles that targeted audiences higher in the funnel, within each geographical location. This included pieces about “the best suburbs”, “the cost of living” and local resources.

We also began a digital PR link acquisition campaign to secure links on high quality sites. Initially, Muval’s backlink profile was low-quality with links from irrelevant sites using aggressive commercial anchors. We acquired backlinks to key pages by approaching businesses in relevant and adjacent niches and providing them with helpful content. We also reached out to high value targets via Google news.

We also created numerous research-based and statistical pieces using Muval’s own data, as well as publicly available statistics with the intention of building up Muval’s authority and topical relevance. These pieces were able to earn natural backlinks without any outreach needed.

Results:

We achieved top 3 rankings across each of the city removalist terms bringing a significant increase in search visibility. We also maintained dominant rankings across interstate terms while also significantly improving visibility across the customer journey

This took the local removalists section of the site from an average of 150 clicks/day to an average of 600 clicks/day.