Cracking The Code of CompareTheMarket’s Winning SEO Strategy

From the table above, the page speed on mobile is slower than on desktop. As of July 2023, 58% of organic website visits are made using a mobile device. Although the mobile speed isn’t awful, it can cause users to leave a website if it takes too long to load, increasing the bounce rate. The core vitals of a website directly impact the user experience of a website, impacting search engine rankings. Google prioritises websites that provide their users with a positive experience, allowing these websites to appear higher in rankings. CompareTheMarket have implemented lazy loading and compressed every image on their website to improve page speed, improving their SEO success. Users won’t stay on a page which takes a long time to load!

The Use of Structured Data

Structured data is coding which is implemented so search engines can understand your website content easier, and display this information in a rich or featured snippet. Using structured data is important to any industry, especially if you rely on organic search to generate leads and enquiries. As an example, we will use ComapreTheMarket’s travel insurance landing page. This page is currently utilising different types of structured data, such as:

• Comment
• FAQPage
• BreadcrumbList
• FinancialProduct
• WebPage

The most important part of this structured data which will attribute to CompareTheMarket’s strategy is the FAQs on this landing page. Below you can see a screenshot showing one of the FAQs on the travel insurance landing page, and the associated featured snippet on Google formed using structured data. This would direct vast amounts of organic traffic to this landing page, increasing the number of conversions and sales. With CompareTheMarket also being a well-known brand now for comparing different types of insurance, the user would be more likely to click on this snippet as they trust this brand. Just to put a number on the success of this landing page from ComapreTheMarket, 300k organic users visit this page per month. Scroll down to see how we think CompareTheMarket can improve its use of structured data!

E-E-A-T and YMYL Considerations

YMYL stands for ‘Your Money or Your Life’ and covers anything that affects the health, well-being, safety and financial security of the target audience of pieces of content. In addition to this, EEAT stands for ‘Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness’. You need to know that EEAT is not a ranking factor in Google, but a component of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines to assess the expertise of content. CompareTheMarket regularly publishes written content in the form of guides and blog posts for users to find via search engines. However, instead of having one main blog page, they are separated into categories which can be found on the navigation bar under each insurance type. Anyone aged from 17 to 70 years and over may need to, at one stage, seek advice or help from CompareTheMarket, so their content needs to feel relevant and authoritative to audiences of different ages.

E-E-A-T – Experience

CompareTheMarket releases written content about personal experiences from their content team. This provides unique insights into their opinions. Take the page ‘Meet The Experts‘ as an example. These experts provide insight into their knowledge of the background of CompareTheMarket and their relevant past jobs, giving the users confidence that these guides are coming from knowledgeable sources.

E-E-A-T – Expertise

The authors of the guides and blog posts on CompareTheMarket must know their stuff to be published. For example, Felicity Hannah who is a Finance Expert, regularly publishes articles on CompareTheMarket’s website. In her author bio, she explains her past jobs working as a personal finance reporter for radio stations and on television. This bio also lists her impressive awards, such as ‘Household Money Journalist of the Year’. Users trust articles written by expert sources. This type of content can offer value to searchers and performs well under Google’s E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T – Authoritativeness

The authoritative section refers to the overall reputation of the relevant industry. Google’s quality raters are told to review the authoritativeness of the content creator and the website overall. Take the article ‘Can I take out a joint home insurance policy?‘ as an example. This is:

• Featured on the home insurance content page
• Written by an insurance comparison expert
• Reviewed by an insurance and money expert
• Posted on a leading insurance comparison website

See below how this information is set out on their website:

E-E-A-T – Trustworthiness

This is the most important part of Google’s E-E-A-T SEO. The Google quality raters must take into account the creator, content and website. CompareTheMarket uses trustworthy original research in their content and opinions from industry experts, increasing the amount of trust users have in their content and their brand. For example, take the post ‘How the rise in living cost is impacting the adoption of electric vehicles – a data-driven guide‘. This concerns sensitive subjects that the user may be experiencing, such as the cost of living crisis. For this to rank in Google, it must be deemed trustworthy by the search engine and contain factual information at the time of writing.

Metadata Tactics

For users to click on CompareTheMarket in organic search results, they must have an enticing metadata strategy in place. Let’s use the most well-known type of insurance they compare – car insurance. The metadata for this page looks like this: The top shows what the metadata looks like in a Chrome extension, and the bottom shows what a user would see in organic search results. Notice how they include the price a user could save, not what the price starts at? That’s got to be attractive to a user. They strategically think about how they can adopt a user’s train of thought in what matters most to them when purchasing car insurance – cost. They also use their target keyword in both the meta title and description. In this case, it would be ‘compare cheap car insurance’, which is what the user would search for. Let’s look at how they adopt metadata strategies with blog posts with their ‘Annual vs Single Trip Insurance‘ post. Their meta title and description, again, both include a target keyword for the blog. In this case, it is ‘annual vs single tip travel insurance’ and ‘annual multi-trip or single-trip travel insurance’. The meta description is short and straight to the point for the user, containing a hook too. The hook makes it more likely for a user to click on their website in organic search results to find out more about the blog.

How Can CompareTheMarket Improve Their Winning SEO Strategy Even Further?

1. Ensure All Relevant Schema Is Used

Upon further research of landing pages, it seems as though some are missing some valuable schema opportunities. Take their Buildings Insurance landing page as an example. When researching this URL, it is missing FAQ schema to help Google understand their FAQ answers in more detail. This page currently has comment, aggregate rating, breadcrumb, product and webpage schema, but not FAQ schema. CompareTheMarket – take note!

2. Redirect Removed Blog Posts

When researching popular written content, we came across the post ‘How far can you drive once the fuel light comes on?‘, which leads to a 404 page. This is not good from a user perspective, especially if users are still finding this guide on the car insurance guides landing page! Below you can see where we found this link on the car insurance content page. CompareTheMarket, how are you going to keep users on your website if selected guides don’t work? The image above shows where this post is located on their website. A well-thought-out and planned SEO strategy can change your business. How can you adopt CompareTheMarket’s SEO strategy?

Contact Fly High Media today for assistance with SEO for your financial business!