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Total Energies Sparks an SEO Fire for Lead Gen

When 3rd party websites became an expensive source of lead generation, this energy company turned to SEO to reclaim its name and 10,000 organic leads in 6 months.

Table of сontents

SEO became the core conductor for this energy company's digital strategy. They escaped hefty 3rd party referral fees and put their own energy behind these impressive numbers.

10,000organic leads in 6 months
45major keywords rank in top 100
11target keywords rank in top 3
“We can’t work without a tool like Semrush. In a big company like Total Energies, it helps me advocate for every SEO decision with the management of multiple departments.”
Samuel Szepetiuk, SEO expert at Total Energies

Business Challenge: Win back organic leads from 3rd party sites

In October 2022, the Belgium division of the multinational energy company Total Energies found itself too dependent on expensive third-party leads. That’s when the company welcomed Samuel Szepetiuk, their first SEO expert and the founder of Octave, in the hopes of breaking away from the paid model and starting to generate most of its leads (contracts) organically

The company faced a few serious challenges:

  1. Unlike many other parts of the world, the European energy provider market is ultra-competitive. In an environment where consumers can switch their electrical company multiple times a year—much like a cell service provider—tens of companies are competing for their business
  2. In recent years, comparison websites have captured most of the traffic in the European market with robust SEO and tools like online calculators. They would then charge energy providers a high premium for every lead—a model Total Energies used to depend on heavily.
  3. The company’s customer base speaks three languages in Belgium and can be easily confused in search with three other bordering countries: France, Germany, and the Netherlands, which are serviced by Total Energies’ other divisions. 

Spoiler alert: the company reached its goal in 2023, won organic traffic share, and generated most of its cost calculator leads organically just 6 months after the campaign launch.

Read on to learn how they did it.
 

Solution: Build belief in SEO and structure keyword goals

After the initial analysis, Samuel realized that while Total Energies had good brand awareness, it wasn’t enough for incremental organic growth. He set the following goals:

  • Grow traffic from non-branded search by answering the most pressing questions customers have around energy
  • Optimize brand search for incorrect spellings both for organic and paid search
  • Optimize the site’s hreflang tags to capture the right audience
  • But first and foremost, bring all the marketing and communication teams on board to take coordinated action on SEO

The latter was not as easy as it may seem. In a big company like Total Energies, the domain is shared by many teams and 20 company departments. Samuel had to create a foundation for future SEO: convincing stakeholders, conducting SEO training, reporting on progress, and making sure every team involved believed in the cause. That’s where Semrush came into play.
 

Step 1: Competitive research

Semrush competitive intelligence is something Samuel pulled up early in the project for benchmarking and strategic planning. This data helped him advocate for big strategy changes. 

To find direct competitors for Total Energies’ core search terms, Samuel:

  1. Took a keyword that generated conversions in Google Ads
  2. Entered it into the Keyword Overview tool to see direct competitors and their domain metrics
Example: list of domains ranking for “energy cost calculator”

Once he had compiled a list, Samuel dug deeper into each competitor. By just entering their domains in each of the mentioned Semrush tools, he found their:

Example: competitor market positioning shown in the Semrush Market Explorer tool

“Semrush competitor research is a quick way to see the actual market situation. You can also find unexpected players that you didn't account for,” Samuel shares. 

Armed with this data, Samuel pitched the next SEO steps to the rest of the company (tens of teams!) to get them up to speed and on board for site optimization. 

Step 2: On-page and technical SEO

Next, it was time to prepare the site for optimization. The Semrush Site Audit revealed 8000 critical errors like missing meta titles and descriptions. The tool gave Samuel an extensive list of URLs with issues, so he easily created Jira tasks for the developers.

Example: Semrush Site Audit error list

“What’s great with Semrush is that you have the full error list, and it's easy to export and resolve all at once. The tool gives you a lot of quick wins,” he shares.

But most importantly, Site Audit found 200 unpublished articles on the website that were only available in one of the languages but not the others. Just publishing those articles alone brought back lots of missed ranking opportunities. 

To double down on the growth, Samuel set to optimize all 200 articles for the best-fitting (and most searched) queries.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Samuel dove into keyword research using Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool. In the process, he:

  • Checked metrics like keyword difficulty, search volume, and intent for the company’s most important terms
  • Looked for keyword variations and supplementary topics he could cover in one article to make it more helpful and all-encompassing for the audience
  • Found the most popular questions that would be included in the FAQ sections
  • Identified low-hanging fruit—terms with low difficulty but considerable search traffic
     
Example: keyword variations of “energy cost”

Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker helped further optimize the pages. The tool analyzes existing content on a page and gives actionable recommendations on improving its rankings with ideal content length, relevant keywords, backlink opportunities, and more.

Example: Semrush On Page SEO Checker suggestions

“Sometimes it's crazy to see how one phrase can change an article’s position. That’s why it’s so important to investigate each keyword and choose the best possible variation,” says Samuel.

Example: Semrush On Page SEO Checker suggestions

Step 4: 150 SEO-focused articles

After ensuring that Total Energies’ 200 new questions/answers articles were SEO-proof using Semrush, the company’s goal for 2023 is to publish 150 more articles with high traffic potential. The team is using the leftover keywords discovered in previous research that were not covered in the existing content.

The team makes sure to link each article to the money pages on their website. The rule is to:

  • place the link at the top of the article
  • Use a descriptive anchor 
  • Include a maximum of 3 links per 700 words

Step 5: Reporting

Samuel uses the Semrush connector to Google Looker Studio for easy monthly reporting. It is an easy way to show the latest progress to the management board and keep all the involved teams up to date. 

Results: 10,000+ organic leads in 6 months

After six months, Total Energies saw incremental improvements:

  • +10,000 organic leads for energy cost calculation queries in 6 months. SEO now brings the most traffic and leads for these priority search terms. 
  • +51,72 in average position in Google search results
  • +45 major keywords (such as “energy supplier”) entered the top 100, including 21 in the top 10, 11 of which are in the top 3
  • Total Energies entered the top 250 most visited websites in Belgium in 2023
     

Key Takeaways:

  • When working within a big and established company structure, start by creating and validating an SEO process with the content team
  • Think outside of the box to find places other than the blog to push your content that is a click away from the home page. For example: guide pages, comparison or calculator pages, or vocabulary pages. Find a way to produce evergreen content that's not about hot news. It will stay useful longer. 
  • Use a tool like Semrush Keyword Magic Tool to find good keywords with lots of traffic and acceptable difficulty. You need to produce content that's not just about your brand. 
  • Ask a copywriter to write with a tool like the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant to be sure you have a good SEO score on your texts
  • Don’t forget to create an internal link to your money pages. Your links should be at the top of the article, behind words (anchors). Stick to a maximum of 3 links per 700 words.
     

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