How we transformed organic performance for the UK's leading directory service: driving a 62% uplift in traffic and indexing over half a million new pages.
118118.com held brand recognition few websites can match, but organic search performance was failing to reflect that authority. With hundreds of thousands of listing pages and complex technical architecture, the site needed both a strategic and technical overhaul to fulfil its commercial potential.
118118.com is the UK's best-known directory service, providing business listings, reviews, and contact information for millions of companies nationwide. Operating at genuine enterprise scale, the site contains hundreds of thousands of individual listing pages and competes against Google's own local results, major aggregators, and vertical directories for search visibility.
The scale and complexity of the site meant that standard SEO approaches would be insufficient. Success required a deep technical audit, a scalable content strategy, and a clear approach to indexation management across the entire site.
Full crawl analysis to identify indexation barriers, duplicate content issues, and crawl budget inefficiencies across hundreds of thousands of pages.
Developed and implemented a priority indexation plan that grew indexed pages from 97,000 to 548,000: unlocking enormous latent search visibility.
Designed a content framework for listing pages that met search intent, satisfied quality guidelines, and could be deployed consistently across the full site.
Built topical authority through editorial content, link acquisition, and a structured social strategy that more than doubled social referral traffic.
Organic sessions grew from 563,000 to 914,000 unique visits per month: a result that fundamentally changed the commercial trajectory of the site.
Indexed pages grew from 97,000 to 548,000: a 464% increase: unlocking vast quantities of previously invisible listing content.
Significant improvement in average ranking positions across both brand and non-brand keyword sets.
Social referral traffic more than doubled, validating the integrated content and distribution strategy.
Talk to us about a tailored SEO strategy that drives real results for your business.