Institute of Directors

The IoD has been at the heart of business since its formation in 1903. The Royal Charter, awarded in 1906, charged the IoD with promoting free enterprise, lobbying government, and setting standards for corporate governance. Today, we remain the authority on entrepreneurialism, professionalism in business and good governance in the UK and beyond.

About the brand

The Institute of Directors is a thriving member community for directors in the UK and beyond. They offer professional development, valuable connections and meaningful influence.

Their aim is to promote high levels of skill, knowledge, professional competence and integrity on the part of directors, and equivalent office holders however described, or companies and other organisations.

Helping our clients tackle new-found challenges

The IoD challenged us to help them achieve two business objectives during 2023:

A revenue target for professional development courses
A target to increase the number of members

We had been working with the IoD for many years previously, but on a lower retainer level for organic search which was split between the IoD and their iconic London hub: 116 Pall Mall. Following the launch of a new site towards the end of 2022, the IoD increased hours for organic search and focussed them away from 116 Pall Mall, allowing us to drive much more meaningful change.

What we did

During the construction of the new website, some decisions had been made which fulfilled a branding requirement, but resulted in pages which were not fully optimised for search, limiting visibility and traffic, and therefore not driving as many conversions as they could.

We worked closely with the IoD and the agency who built the site to agree a better balance between search optimisation and branding, allowing us to restructure pages, which helped to improve rankings against target keywords and increase conversions.

Having optimised the content for core conversion pages, we then worked on other aspects of best practice, including:

Identifying further high-value keywords to optimise against
Identifying and fixing technical issues
Identifying and fixing performance issues

As a result of these activities, we started to see much stronger YoY organic search results by Q3 2023, giving us an opportunity to spread our work to other areas.

Expanding visibility to attract new audiences

Once we were confident that we would be able to achieve both business objectives, we diversified our approach to allow us to achieve a secondary objective of increasing brand awareness earlier in the conversion journey:

A full data-driven content audit to identify landing pages which could be further improved to increase CTR from SERPs
An in-depth keyword gap analysis against multiple search competitors to identify content opportunities
Exploration of sales data received from the client’s CRM into GA4 to help us to improve conversion allocation and improvements in targeting

Record breaking organic results

As a result of our hard work, we achieved the following results from organic search:

61.16% increase in the number of keywords ranking in the top 3 positions, helping to ensure the IoD was driving high levels of relevant traffic
Organic search generated 49.54% of total online Professional Development revenue target by itself
Organic search increased membership numbers by around 15%, helping the IoD to meet their membership target
72.55% of conversion pathways included organic search, making it a dominant channel for driving performance in collaboration with other inbound channels

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