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National PR coverage for Liberty Living

Content and online PR case study for the student accommodation sector

The brief

Liberty Living is a student accommodation provider based in the UK. They provide halls of residence to students across numerous cities in the UK, and came to us with a view to improving rankings and visibility for their key locations, including Manchester, Newcastle and London.

125

links

140

pieces of coverage

25

keywords have seen improvement

The strategy 

We needed to improve rankings of location pages by acquiring links and optimising the internal linking.

Competitors had much more authority to deeper pages meaning that they were ranking better. We were also competing with local housing suppliers as well as large national competitors.

Content and online PR Plan

Step one
Earn links to local pages. This required a range of tactics:

 

  • Existing mentions
  • Local listings
  • Student services
  • Direct contact with universities.
Step two

Proactive PR. The aim was to increase overall site authority and enable us to target student publications:

 

  • Our first project was the ‘Student Autocomplete’ campaign to find out what students are Googling about different university cities.
  • The campaign also enabled us to create local interest around our key cities helping us build links and relevance to the key pages we identified in the strategy.

The results

Keyword positions

  • Key locations are Newcastle, London and Manchester. All have been the focus of link earning activity and all have seen an increase in rankings
  • ‘student accommodation Newcastle’ #2 +5 positions
  • ‘student accommodation London’ #10 +7 positions
  • ‘student accommodation Manchester’ #7 +5 positions
  • 25 out of 40 ‘student accommodation’ terms we are tracking have seen ranking improvement

Coverage and links

  • 140 pieces of coverage, including non-linking mentions
  • 125 links obtained
    • 61 to locations
    • 33 to homepage
    • 8 to other areas of the site
  • 56 different pages linked to

Average domain authority: 43

 

32 pieces of coverage including:

  • Glasgow Live
  • Coventry Telegraph

Key existing mention links

Here is a selection of university links that have been acquired:

  • University of Birmingham (DA82)
  • University of Manchester (DA86)
  • University of Notre Dame (DA86)
  • Northeastern University (DA85)
  • Visit Scotland (DA84).

Google Autocompletes Project so far:

  • 23 links including:
    • Business Insider (DA95)
    • Cosmopolitan (DA88)
    • London Evening Standard (DA89)
    • Metro (DA87)

Summary

There has been a significant increase in Liberty Living’s rankings, and this can be attributed to the quality links we have acquired.

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