Driving Visibility & Ownership of Key Titles for Sky

Reclaiming search visibility and driving site visits with strategic content and keyword optimisation

We started working with Sky because, despite the network creating and airing some of 2023’s biggest shows, consumers were regularly assuming that its shows were produced by or aired on Netflix. We worked together to scope and deliver a proactive and reactive process that saw us steal back Share of Search and improve brand association for shows including The Last of Us, And Just Like That…, Succession and Brassic, via smart, engaging, optimised content in the site’s /watch folder.

What we did

Strategy & Insight

Keyword research

Content planning

Impact reporting

The results

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visits to newly created Sky.com/watch pages

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of all non-brand visits to Sky.com were to new /watch pages in Dec 2023

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orders generated from customers who visited /watch pages

The challenge

The team at Sky were growing increasingly frustrated seeing a high-volume of searches like, ‘Is The Last of Us on Netflix?’ and, ‘Brassic Netflix’. These were shows that the business was investing huge sums of money to produce and/or air, and yet off-site media activity wasn’t doing enough to drive that brand association. We could see a vast keyword landscape around key titles, spanning characters, storylines, outfits, filming locations and more, and yet a lack of on-site content saw editorial and rival network sites ranking at the top of Google for these searches, where Sky should have been.

Our approach

We agreed 16 priority shows to tackle over the course of a year. These shows comprised HBO- and Sky-produced titles, including The Last of Us, A Town Called Malice, The Idol, Rob and Romesh Versus, And Just Like That…, Brassic and more.

In advance of each show airing, we conducted full keyword research and produced a content plan, and associated briefs, with the aim of securing top-spot visibility for the full search landscape. Sometimes, this required us to anticipate search behaviour based on audience search behaviour for past, similar shows, and at other times there was sufficient buzz to drive search interest ahead of the first episode airing. We continued doing keyword research during each show’s transmission period, to spot ‘live’ content opportunities based on audience reactions to the TV content, and produced further briefs accordingly.

We worked with the Sky team to get the content live on the site’s /watch folder, and optimised in a timely manner.

The impact

We grew Share of Search for all shows we tackled, driving more than a million visits to our new content, which comprised almost 20% of all non-brand visits to the site in December 2023. The Sky website frequently appeared in position one and the Featured Snippets in Google, for queries like, ‘Where is the Rat and Cutter Brassic?’, ‘And Just Like That Netflix’ and ‘House of Kardashian release date’.

Significantly, when we compared a show that we’d not created content around, House of the Dragon, with a show that we had created content around, The Last of Us, we found that The Last of Us had generated 314% more clicks to the Sky website, despite House of the Dragon driving more search interest.

Whilst it wasn’t a key aim of the project, it also supported new customer acquisition with almost 800 orders for commercial products coming from site visitors who’d visited new /watch pages.