Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 22.07.2024 
United Rentals and VML have been shortlisted for the Global Search Awards for Best Use of Search – B2B (SEO). Our submission highlights our work on United Rentals’ ecommerce marketplace. VML combined our SEO and commerce content knowledge to reimagine the product content for each phase of the purchase journey in the top three equipment super-categories.
Who We Are
VML is one of the largest creative advertising agencies in the world with over 30,000 employees globally. The Discoverability group at VML, encompassing over 120 people worldwide, includes performance content writers, SEO experts and paid search strategists. This team works to create powerful, data-driven search campaigns and digital content that drive visibility, traffic, and conversions for brands. Our client, United Rentals, is an industrial and construction equipment rental company based in the United States. Our SEO experts and performance content writers worked with United Rentals to optimize its product content and improve user experience through the rental process.
Our Work With United Rentals
The goal of our work with United Rentals was to improve user experience when renting equipment on the website and enhance website discoverability. United Rentals challenged us to improve the quality of product-related content in the rental catalog, specifically by updating product information, adjusting the style and abbreviations for consistency, and incorporating specification data into product detail pages and product listing pages. We dug deeper and focused on the consumers’ full-funnel journey through the website, aiming to inform and engage users at the top of the funnel and ensure that they received the most relevant information first, which would then drive conversion and promote growth in organic visibility and revenue for United Rentals.
To accomplish this, the Discoverability team optimized the product-related content on the website for three priority product categories: forklifts, aerial equipment and earthmoving equipment. Prior to this workstream, the rental content on the website was not optimized and therefore did not have a lot of visibility or traffic. We updated product detail page and category page content to improve discoverability and ensure comprehensiveness and accuracy; removed low-quantity owned product detail pages to improve order fulfillment; instituted a redirect mapping strategy to preserve organic traffic; and optimized images and product filters so customers could more easily find equipment, confirm specifications, and convert. Because of the technical nature of this content, this cross-functional workstream included extensive research of the rental products by interviewing subject matter experts and having in-depth conversations with the United Rentals team.
The Impact
This pilot project had a lot of success with organic traffic and revenue for the United Rentals website. Organic traffic to these optimized pages increased by 33.9%, and organic revenue increased by 23.4% one year after they were published to the site. Additionally, the average share of search trends for the specific categories were +27.86% for forklifts, +0.57% for aerial equipment and +15.57% for earthmoving equipment in less than a year. Because of the success of this project, we have continued to optimize content in more categories on the United Rentals website to continue to increase traffic and visibility. We have since improved our process by pulling in specification researchers and refining our quality assurance process to speed up our timeline and increase content accuracy.
Being shortlisted for this award is an incredible honor for both the Discoverability team at VML and our United Rentals partners.
“We have had a long-standing partnership with the VML team and have established a shared commitment to building a quality product with world-class customer experience,” said Autumn Terpin, digital product manager at United Rentals. “This is a perfect example of how the SEO and content experience from VML and product and industry knowledge from the United Rentals team came together to create an incredible rental experience for customers. It also helped enhance discoverability and drive awareness for United Rentals as a whole.”
Connect with VML on Instagram, and X, and United Rentals on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
