Thorp Haval GWM

Design & Development, Search Engine Optimization

Thorp Haval GWM is a premier Haval dealership in Cape Town, offering top-quality Haval SUVs with exceptional service. Their collaboration with GWM expands their vehicle offerings, including exclusive SUVs and bakkies, allowing them to meet the diverse needs of their clients. With a knowledgeable team and a 10-year/1,000,000 km warranty on new vehicles, customers are assured of quality and reliability, whether they seek rugged performance or urban sophistication.

1,700%

increase in conversions

1118.29%

increase in organic traffic

776%

increase in keyword rankings

Thorp Haval GWM

Design & Development, Search Engine Optimization

Thorp Haval GWM is a premier Haval dealership in Cape Town, offering top-quality Haval SUVs with exceptional service. Their collaboration with GWM expands their vehicle offerings, including exclusive SUVs and bakkies, allowing them to meet the diverse needs of their clients. With a knowledgeable team and a 10-year/1,000,000 km warranty on new vehicles, customers are assured of quality and reliability, whether they seek rugged performance or urban sophistication.

1,700%

increase in conversions

1118.29%

increase in organic traffic

776%

increase in keyword rankings

Brief & Objectives

Thorp Haval GWM approached Ruby Digital for SEO and Website Development Services to increase leads on their Haval Cars, from new Cars to pre-owned cars, and after-sales support.

Ruby Digital designed and created a new website design that was introduced into all Thorp Car brand websites.

With research, Ruby Digital compiled a comprehensive SEO strategy with specific goals and determinators of success, including generating high-quality content based on specific industry-related search terms, setting and improving specific KPIs related to the client’s needs and goals, and lastly, working to close the gap of direct and non-direct competitor keywords.

Challenges

Before the Thorp Motor Group partnered with Ruby Digital, the Thorp Haval GWM website experienced a hack, leading to 1000s of URLs with damaging topics attached to the Haval website. This led to Google actioning a manual penalty.

As the website was unattainable due to the hack, a whole new website had to be redeveloped, meaning that due to a new website design and a manual penalty, Ruby Digital had to implement an SEO strategy for a website on a brand-new domain.

Another challenge that we experienced was the competitive nature of the automotive industry as you are not only trying to compete on a brand-to-brand level, but also against the various brand dealerships.

Some of the limitations that we experienced over the last 10 months:

The website hack caused a manual penalty issued by Google, which had to be sorted first before any SEO could take place. However, the website redesign and development were able to remove the hacked remanets and Google removed their manual penalty.
We started with zero data due to Thorp Haval GWM having little to no data before partnering with Ruby Digital. For this reason, we were not able to fully give an accurate interpretation of where Thorp Haval GWM’s results would return to or show improvement.
The automotive industry is extremely competitive, due to having only a limited number of buyers per month and several dealerships all targeting a specific area.
As mentioned above, with only limited cars being sold a month, this also equates to limited searches per month (i.e. limited keyword volume). Furthermore, as this is a higher niche brand, the keyword volume for the most important keywords isn’t as high as other products, services, or brands (i.e. high keyword difficulty).

Our Solution

Ruby Digital developed a new website with a fresh look that not only ensured the removal of the website hack, but also exceeded client expectations. The website redesign also became the signature theme for the other 4 Thorp Brands, including websites for Suzuki, Chery, Isuzu and Subaru.
Ruby Digital started with a formulated and proven SEO strategy on February 1st, 2023. We then began building a strong consistent SEO campaign, ensuring that the technical SEO and user experience were best optimised.
A detailed competitor analysis was compiled to ensure that our SEO strategy was expected to meet the business goal of the client but also to ensure that Thorp Haval GWM could have a competitive edge over the other dealers in Cape Town.
SEO keyword research was fundamental in our approach, as Thorp Haval GWM has a limited number of keywords that are relevant to the portfolio and the brand, with other dealerships targeting the same industry, meaning that it was important for Ruby to understand all types of long-tail, short tail and exact matched keywords.
We have continued to implement strong content optimisations for specific Haval model-related keywords and non-branded keywords.
Ruby identified important keywords and referring domains that competitors are ranking for or have pointed towards their websites. With this information, we created a strategy to improve Haval’s domain authority by submitting specifically targeted articles on high-authority domains.

Results

Over the 10-month period since Ruby started the SEO campaign, the results seen from the implementation of our SEO strategy have been positive.

Many overall metrics have improved substantially. Starting with organic traffic, Thorp Haval GWM’s organic sessions increased by 1118.29%.

We have also seen a 1,700% increase in relevant monthly conversions.

Thorp Haval GWM also saw an improvement of 776% in keywords ranking in the Top 100, with Thorp Haval GWM ranking for 25 keywords in April 2023, and now ranking for 219 keywords in February 2024.

Thorp also saw an improvement of 400% in keywords ranking on Page 1. Thorp Haval GWM was ranking on Page 1 of Google for 21 keywords in April 2023 and is now ranking for 105 keywords in February 2024.