From the forecourt to the first page of Google: Using Needle to examine the car leasing sector
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The car leasing industry is a wide array of established brands and new, online-first start-ups. Whereas once consumers had limited options when opting for finance, now there are dozens of brands offering payment plans and options on an ever-expanding range of cars.
Slick branding and seamless buyer journeys have eaten away at the traditional car leasing business model creating a landscape that is more and more found primarily online.
Needle gives you the keys to success, here’s its three key features
By using our proprietary technology – Needle – we can assess how brands are performing in any industry. By combining the data we get one source of truth and can show brands exactly what they need to do to grow their organic presence online in their industry.
Whereas tools such as Ahrefs show you how you perform when compared to virtually every other website on the internet, Needle gets to the point and compares you against the competitors that matter to you.
In a typical Needle, there are over 20 areas of data that can be viewed and used as springboards for new campaigns. Below are just three of the key features you can find in a given Needle.
- 3D graph: We use network science and key organic metrics – domain authority, unique backlinks, and keyword reach to create an interactive 3D graph that visualises your industry and where you sit amongst your competitors. This graph, which you will see frequently throughout this piece, allows you to see the internet the way Google sees it and provides you the opportunity to see what you need to increase your performance.
- Industry averages: SEO can feel like a bit of a mystery with no one place saying ‘Do X to achieve Y’… until now. Because Needle assesses one entire industry, it can provide you with black-and-white numbers and tell you explicitly the number of links, pages, and keywords you need to have to rank in the top 25% of your industry.
- Keyword volatility: Much like a Richter scale, this part of a Needle shows us how volatile the ranking movements are for 20 of the most popular terms across the top 30 positions. The more volatile industry means you need to keep an eye on your site’s performance.
So, where are we currently?
In summary, the organic online landscape for the car leasing industry is an incredibly volatile one.
Based on the chart produced by Needle we can see that there are many changes to keyword rankings for terms that bring these brands business. Despite this volatility, several big players are riding these keyword changes such as Select Car Leasing, Vanarama, and Leasing.com to name but a few. Following these major players are a mix of brands enjoying growth periods. Finally, below them are start-up businesses that are starting their growth journey and have promising futures.
As well as a volatility graph we can also see a 3D graph of what the car leasing industry looks like to Google. You can interactively pan, zoom, and tilt this graph here (just scroll down the page).
Like in every industry we view with Needle, we see a right-to-left arc of sites within the sector, ranging from ‘one-man-bands’ at the bottom-right, to industry behemoths at the top-left.
The three main axes of the chart are unique links, keyword reach, and domain authority. By using these axes, and plotting sites accordingly, we can quickly see just how and why particular sites dominate in a sector – or indeed why they are in the position that they currently are in.
The following view of the same graph shows that Select Car Leasing has a good lead in terms of the number of keywords that the site ranks for. In this graph, we can also see how Select Car Leasing leads the way with the most unique links within the sector, even though this time, it is a much closer competition, with Leasing.com, Vanarama, and Nationwide Vehicle Contracts (not referenced) also doing particularly well.
Also, and very significantly, Vanarama also sponsors The National League (the 5th tier of English football), which leads to hundreds of thousands of mentions, and many, many links.
Many other websites in the sector have followed suit, sponsoring football clubs, or stadiums, getting lots of mentions and high-value links along the way. Sponsoring major sports leagues, stadiums, clubs etc, can be a very useful way to build organic success in Google.
How do consumers look for car leasing?
As previously mentioned, because Needle concentrates on an industry, we can see things that no one else can. One of these things is estimating the way that visitors engage with websites in a sector.
| Mobile searches | Desktop searches | Paid clicks | Organic clicks | |
| Industry average | 39.78% | 60.22% | 30.38% | 69.62% |
In the table above, we can see that almost 40% of searches that find a car leasing site are done on mobile, with 60% on desktop. And you can see that paid clicks make up 30% of visitors as a whole.
Why is this information important? Imagine that your site in this sector is only getting 35% of traffic from organic clicks. You would know instantly that you could be attracting many more organic visitors. This would indicate that your SEO strategy, and/or content strategy is incorrect.
And if you only receive 20% of traffic from mobile, then this would of course indicate issues with your mobile SEO and perhaps page layouts.
While the 3D graph tells us a lot about the car leasing industry, the simple table above also gives very useful information. For example, while 30% of traffic from paid clicks is a significant number, 69% of organic clicks indicate that people want to browse more on their terms and will put effort into reading organic page titles and snippets. More so than in many other sectors (that we know from all Needle data).
Examining what volatility means in the car leasing industry
We mentioned how volatile the changes in rankings are for this industry but we thought it would be valuable to go into greater depth.
A greater level of volatility indicates the competitiveness of particular keywords as brands look to improve their SEO by writing better content to rank higher.
As you can see for the main keyword in the sector (car leasing), volatility per day is consistent. This graph shows that every day, there are around 10 ranking position changes in the top 30 of Google for this keyword.
By examining the car leasing Needle over the past year or so, we have seen increasingly more volatility in keywords relating to the comparison of car leasing deals. As the charts below show, this indicates a swing in consumers being aware of – and wanting websites that show comparisons of deals, rather than just an endpoint supplier.
Are you a new car leasing company looking to break through?
Needle allows us to study data from an industry perspective rather than just for individual domains allowing us to truly see what others don’t.
An example of this perspective is this table which shows some key metrics that a brand may want to use to judge how successful their organic campaigns are.
Here, we can see the domain authority and the number of links, indexed pages, and keywords a brand needs if they want to become an average website in this sector or indeed a site in the top 25%.
|
Industry average |
Top 25% |
||
| Links | 868 | Links | 2000 |
| Indexed Pages | 3846 | Indexed Pages | 8362 |
| Domain Authority | 34 | Domain Authority | 53 |
| Keyword Reach | 20261 | Keyword Reach | 68381 |
This data works as a pretty good indicator of what it takes to do well in a sector. Any brand that wants to make a dent in the organic world of car leasing could do worse than to use these numbers as a guide.
The way to win? Consistent content
Below is a graph of the estimated keyword reach (how many keywords each site can be found for) of the top sites in the car leasing industry. A very simple graph of course, but one that shows just how much the top three sites in the industry dominate.
The following graph shows estimated traffic per month, once again where Select Car Leasing and Nationwide lead the way.
By creating regular, valuable content on relevant topics related to your industry (in this case, car leasing), brands can grow their keyword reach and traffic.
Is video a potential avenue for a brand brave enough to invest?
An interesting quirk of the car leasing industry is the amount of video content that is posted, not by companies but by influencers and enthusiasts. As you can see Needle can pull thumbnails and links to the top-performing videos in the industry.
The volume of video content out there would indicate there is an appetite for it. The reason for said appetite is likely down to the level of research a typical customer goes through during the ‘messy middle’ phase of their buying journey.
Interestingly, a company mentioned in our car leasing Needle has yet to grab the bull by the horns and invest in high-quality video content.
The many forms of digital PR in car leasing
The car leasing sector is one of the best in the UK at using digital PR tactics to promote itself and improve organic rankings through mentions and links. By using Needle we’re able to access an up-to-the-minute cross-section of digital PR activity across the industry and view the types of stories and publications that work for competitors.
Notice, in this image, the number of times Leasing.com is mentioned, a result of this activity is that Google will view them as an extremely trusted source.
Another interesting note is that Select Car Leasing’s sponsorship of Reading FC’s stadium helps to get them in the news (and thus earn organic links and mentions across hundreds of websites across a football season) in a non-car-related way.
Needle goes beyond the surface
Whilst this blog is not exhaustive and covers only a small percentage of the reports contained within Needle’s suite of tools, it is very clear to see how and why the leading sites rank so well in the car leasing industry.
Despite trends and new ways of doing SEO emerging, the evidence continues to point to the fact that websites with well-produced, consistent content over a sustained period can achieve this.
And while the leasing sector is changing thanks to the emergence of comparison sites, broker brands that continue to produce content of the highest quality on a very consistent basis will more than likely take significant shares of organic visitors, and produce the most leads for their sales teams to work on.
