RugbyPass - Rugby World Cup 2023

During the ideation process, we quickly realised that we needed to create a concept that was on-brand and would give us a voice in a crowded sports news space. In addition, we also knew that the idea also needed to be engaging, have search potential and generate coverage and links across the tournament.

Based on our keyword research and competitor analysis, we realised that interactive content would perform best. As a result, we recommended ‘team picker’ and ‘player picker’ tools based around search terms - e.g. ‘who will win the Rugby World Cup?’ and ‘what’s the greatest Rugby World Cup XV’ – to ask RugbyPass’ fans and some chosen rugby experts/legends to use them and share their picks.

This approach allowed us to create unique, shareable and EEAT-led content assets. Additionally, it also allowed us to leverage this content and data to create eye-catching rugby news stories - that we could outreach.

Additionally, we also recognised the need to produce a Rugby World Cup content hub on the RugbyPass site to capture search interest, provide a place to house our campaign and help drive sign-ups - requiring keyword research, URL structuring and page mapping, including RugbyPass’ data feeds and including relevant internal links and sign-up CTAs.

Finally, we also suggested ‘reactive digital PR’ to help promote RPTV via its flagship programme, ‘The Big Jim Show’.

Following approval of our campaign assets, we had three months to deliver the campaign.

We started with a keyword research and URL structuring project, which mapped out which Rugby World Cup-related content would be needed. As part of this, we created a Rugby World Cup hub that acted as a ‘Wiki’ for fans and provided them with key pieces of information.

Additionally, technical SEO direction was supplied. As part of this, we provided suggestions and fixes to issues impacting crawlability and rankings at a site-wide level. Fixes included content cannibalisation issues, metadata optimisation and hreflang.