In 2022, BOXT appointed to Digitaloft after a period of declining organic search visibility. Fast-forward three years, and the boiler-industry disruptor now consistently holds top-three rankings for high-value keywords such as “new boiler” and “boilers.”
In this SEO case study, you’ll learn how we helped BOXT reverse a decline in organic search visibility and achieve consistent top-three rankings for competitive “revenue-driving” keywords.
We’ll walk you through the strategy that delivered a 61% increase in organic sessions in year one, earned over 3,000 pieces of coverage, and built a strong foundation for long-term organic growth.
The Client.
BOXT is a multi-award-winning online platform that simplifies the process of upgrading your home.
Founded by industry experts with over 70 years of combined experience, BOXT was established to bring price transparency and ease of purchase to the home energy market, with the platform offering a seamless online experience, allowing customers to purchase products such as boilers, air conditioning units, and electric vehicle chargers at fixed, fair prices, with installation included.
The Brief.
Having seen organic search visibility decline for six months since working with a new agency, BOXT engaged Digitaloft to reverse this trend.
BOXT had a prioritisation issue.
Their organic performance decline was a result of competitors gaining ground while they focused on tasks that weren’t going to deliver the desired impact.
The focus has been on things like PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals, when SEO basics had been overlooked. The majority of BOXT’s press coverage and links came from their football sponsorship deals.
We needed to change this.
The brief was simple, reverse the trend and accelerate SEO visibility.
The Strategy.
Identifying the growth-blocking issues
While previous SEO strategies had focused on technical SEO, they tended to lead with easier, low-impact tactics that would drive minimal growth – things like improving page speed and fixing broken links.
While these are important elements of an SEO strategy – they’re growth opportunities – they weren’t an immediate priority for the BOXT site.
Instead, BOXT were experiencing growth-blocking issues – technical SEO problems that were preventing the site from seeing any meaningful growth at all.
One example related to the site’s use of JavaScript. Almost the entire site was rendered using client-side JavaScript, and as a result, search engine crawlers were being served largely blank pages. Without resolving this issue as a priority, the impacts of any other growth tactics – whether that’s content, technical SEO or link building – would be minimal.
By identifying and resolving the growth-blocking issues, we were left with a solid, technically strong website, which provided the perfect springboard for future organic growth.
Understanding the business inside-out
Any decent SEO roadmap needs to align with a business’s core goals and objectives. As an agency, this means a really thorough onboarding process to understand clients’ commercial goals, marketing objectives, and other nuances of the business.
For BOXT, we could see clear seasonality – boilers are big business in the winter months – which meant building out a roadmap that reflected this.
During the summer, our content and digital PR efforts can focus on product groups such as air conditioning and solar, while also considering any site-wide technical improvements we might need to make.
When winter hits, we know that it is our time to hone all our efforts towards boilers, with cohesive priorities across all areas of the strategy.
Building best-in-class landing pages
With the right foundations in place, we were then free to ensure our key, revenue-driving pages were – quite simply – better than the competition. This meant having a really deep understanding of BOXT’s customers and what they wanted from these landing pages.
For example, did someone searching for “new boiler” want information about different boiler brands and models, or did they simply want a quick price for how much a new boiler would cost them?
Through detailed SERP analysis, competitor examination and keyword research, we could craft best-in-class pages with a content and structure that prioritised user intent, information gain and on-page experience.
By keeping these principles at the core of our content strategy and working with the digital PR team to earn high authority and relevant links into these landing pages has allowed us to remain consistently high in the SERPs for many years.
Not standing still
Even with some really impressive rankings and results so far, this doesn’t mean we rest on our laurels. In recent months, we have seen such dramatic changes to the search landscape and the way that search results are presented. And thanks to Google’s documentation leak in May 2024, we’ve learnt so much more about the way Google views and values content and links.
With so many changes at play, SEO strategies can’t afford to stand still.
As an example, we’ve seen a big shift in the search intent for some of our biggest keywords in the last twelve months. Searches that were previously informational are now more transactional, while some transactional searches now show a more localised intent. So we’ve adapted our strategies accordingly.
Just because you ranked #1 a year ago, it doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to rank #1 now.
Building relevant links at scale
Earning relevant links at scale was a priority for our strategy, as prior to working with Digitaloft, the majority of BOXT’s coverage was coming from their football sponsorships – and while this was valuable for brand visibility, it didn’t fully leverage their core expertise in home heating and energy solutions.
This dependency on sponsorship-driven PR limited their potential to establish themselves as a thought leader in their industry and create long-term, sustainable organic growth through earned media.
We knew we needed to change that, and at a time when energy bills were rocketing, there was so much opportunity for a brand like BOXT to come in and really dominate the news agenda surrounding energy bills for consumers.
We executed a digital PR strategy to not only supercharge their organic growth by earning links into topic clusters and key revenue-driving pages, but we also increased BOXT’s brand awareness and got them in front of their target audience.
Since 2022, we have earned nearly 3,000 links for BOXT on high-authority publications, including national, lifestyle, energy, and regional publications on relevant topics such as heating and energy bills. By addressing these relevant topics and positioning the BOXT brand and spokespeople as industry experts, we were able to get BOXT consistently featured in the press in key conversations relevant to the brand.
Below you can see how we consistently earned links month after month through our digital PR strategy:
Our strategy initially included data-led hero campaigns and our “always on” reactive strategy. However, after a few months, we pivoted to an expert insights-led strategy, which utilised BOXT’s experts both reactively and proactively.
A key focus for us was earning links to product and category pages, ultimately the revenue-driving pages, to ensure these pages were ranking at the top of the SERPS. We were building up the reputation and authority of both the BOXT brand, and their spokespeople, earning links into author pages and demonstrating E-E-A-T.
You can see from the below graph how the increase in the number of referring domains coincides with the increase in organic traffic.
Our digital PR strategy was aligned with the wider SEO strategy to ensure we were earning links directly into the topic clusters and high-priority pages being prioritised, which supported BOXT earning those top-ranking positions across priority keywords.
The Results.
The campaign delivered standout results, driving consistent organic growth and significantly improving BOXT’s search visibility. By focusing on high-impact SEO opportunities and securing relevant press coverage, we helped to establish BOXT as a dominant player in the highly competitive boiler market.
- A 61% increase in organic sessions in year 1, with increases every year since
- Non-brand clicks to the site during the last 3 months of 2024 were up by 23% year-on-year
- Consistent top-3 rankings for high-value keywords such as “new boiler”, “boilers” and “boiler replacement”.
- 3,061 pieces of coverage achieved, including 2,857 earned links
- Average DR of 62 across all coverage
These results reflect the long-term impact of a well-executed strategy — not only driving short-term visibility gains but also building a strong foundation for sustained growth in organic search.