How an events organiser increased sales by 38% in six months

Until 2024, Axion Now Events, a specialist events organiser, were successfully using social media, email marketing and referrals to drive traffic to their website and sales for their ten-year-old business. These marketing channels were tried and tested, but attracted mostly local or existing customers. With a key business goal to expand across the whole country, Axion Now Events wanted to reach a new audience that didn’t already know the brand.

At that time only 16% of their web traffic was from organic search, so the company realised there was untapped potential to reach more customers across the country using SEO to help them grow into a nationally-focused business from their single location in Buckinghamshire.

They decided to continue with their usual marketing efforts using social media, email marketing and referrals, but additionally invest in a six-month SEO programme.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to the process that the digital marketing agency, Ditto Digital, used to increase Axion Now Events' organic traffic by 677% and increase sales by 38% in just six months.

This same approach can be applied whether you’re in services, retail, B2B, tech, manufacturing or almost any other sector.

The steps were:

1. Core web vitals improvement
2. Basic SEO optimisation
3. Content strategy

Here’s a bit about what that involved.

1. Core web vitals improvement

A Technical SEO Audit was completed to check for issues with Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics and more generally with speed performance. The website met the minimum standard for only one out of the three Core Web Vitals metrics and had a poor Speed Performance score of 39 (out of 100).

The core web vitals issues were:

• LCP metric (Largest Contentful Paint) was too high, due to overly large images above-the-fold on multiple important pages.

This was resolved by resizing the images to make them smaller, so that neither the width nor height dimension exceeded 1,000 pixels. All images were also compressed using the Wix Pro inbuilt image settings (this took a bit of trial and error to find the right balance to preserve image quality but improve the performance of the website).

For those with WordPress websites, various free image compression plugins will do the same job such as ShortPixel.

• CLS metric (Cumulative Layout Shift) was too high, due to large images being used on multiple pages where a smaller version was adequate. For example, a 960px wide image being used on a page section that only allowed for images 300px wide.

This was resolved by using smaller versions of the images and explicitly including the width and height attributes in the image elements on the page. Again, this is a simple job in WordPress or Wix.

In addition, the following changes were also made to improve performance:

• Images were converted from PNG format to WEBP format to benefit from the smaller size and hence faster load times. There are free tools that will do this for you online.
• Large decorative background images on web pages were removed as they added little to the visual appeal but slowed down initial load times.

Making these changes resulted in the Speed Performance score increasing from 39 to 59, which was a vast improvement for relatively little effort.

Pro Tip: Google Search Console will highlight any issues with Core Web Vitals metrics for a whole website. Or you can do a quick check of a single URL in Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.

2 Optimise key landing pages

Existing priority web pages were optimised using the free SEObility tool to identify basic SEO issues with website structure, content quality and “meta data” such as page titles and descriptions. This tool makes recommendations for optimisation improvements that are simple to follow so it’s ideal for businesses aiming to do basic SEO in-house.

Based on the outcome of the SEObility analysis almost all of the priority web pages had improvements made. These changes enabled the “Optimisation Score” to be increased from an average of 64% to an average of 80%.

3. Establish a realistic content strategy

The Axion Now Events website was now technically much-improved and better optimised, but it still lacked the level of content that would enable it to demonstrate the company’s expertise and build brand credibility. And, of course, outperform competitors in online search and increase sales.

The obvious way to improve and expand the content was by providing expert articles, tips and advice. However, in an online world awash with content – much of it generated by AI - the content strategy had to differentiate this company from the crowd, while at the same time showcasing genuine expertise to Google and the Large Language Models (LLMs) used by generative AI Apps like ChatGPT.

The company’s prospective customers would not be interested in run-of-the-mill content (and certainly not AI-generated content) but were looking for expert insights.

To deliver a successful content strategy, we created a Pillar-Cluster Content Model to show search engines their expertise, improve internal linking and keep visitors engaged on the website for longer (because engagement rate is a ranking factor).

Initially, we conducted brainstorming sessions with the Axion Now Events team to come up with ideas and then researched what Google shows in relevant “People Also Asked” sections of the search results.

This pillar-cluster content model – indeed any pillar-cluster content model - consists of:

Pillar pages

Each pillar page is a comprehensive, broad piece of content covering a central topic important to customers. Google is specifically looking for helpful, people-centred content so we focused on identifying customer problems, challenges and aspirations.

The majority of pillar topics are evergreen and will only need minor updates over time. For added credibility we displayed testimonials and included relevant data.

Cluster content

More specific, focused articles or guides that cover subtopics of the pillar pages. This content answers very specific questions, it’s actionable and practical. These topics can be evergreen but also cover seasonal trends, new products or customer interest peaks.

Internal links

Every cluster topic links to its pillar topic and also to other cluster topics where relevant. Creating multiple internal links to the pillar pages identifies them as some of the most important pages on the website.

Summary

To recap, a bespoke SEO strategy was established by the Digital Marketing Agency Ditto Digital for the specialist events organiser Axion Now Events. It broadly consisted of three parts:

1. Core Web Vitals Analysis
2. Basic SEO Optimisation
3. Content Strategy

The results of this SEO strategy, as shown in the Google Analytics screenshots below, were a 677% increase in organic traffic over six months and a like-for-like increase in sales of 38% over the same period.

Image: 6-month comparison of visits and engagement rate by channel

Image: Highlight May vs September web visits due to SEO

Copyright 2025. Featured post written by Michelle Symonds of Ditto Digital.