Case Study: How Expert Content Helped Establish Confused.com As a B2B Thought Leader
We’ve been working with Confused.com, one of the leading Price Comparison Websites (PCWs) in the UK, helping create expert-backed content for their website.
In this case study, we’ll cover:
The situation: invest more in expert content to position the company as a B2B thought leader
The results: better topical authority, more established expert profiles and a becoming a B2B thought leader
How we did it: recurring interviews and thorough writing process
The situation: invest more in expert content to help position the company as a B2B thought leader
Confused.com is one of the most well known and trusted comparison sites in the UK. Founded in 2001, they were the first ever price comparison website and effectively helped establish the industry. They redefined how consumers shop for insurance in the UK by making it easier to buy insurance online.
Customers can save their details in the Confused.com app, get tips on how to get lower premiums, and gain rewards. Confused.com describes itself as the “consumer champion”, and a big part of that is creating in-depth, user-friendly and easy-to-read content on their website on insurance topics and a lot more.
As a direct-to-consumer brand, content and SEO plays a big part of their acquisition efforts. They’re one of the most visited websites in the UK, with over 4M visits in December 2023 alone.
In 2022 and 2023, Google launched a series of Google updates, where the search engine made it clear that they valued content that was helpful based on expertise. This coincided with a growing conversation that the Confused.com team were having internally on the developing trends in content. As Ciara Bale, SEO Manager at Confused.com says herself:
“It was part of a growing conversation we were having in the business about following developing trends in content, how that can then impact search and brand trust.
After lots of discussion, we came to the conclusion that we should invest more time portraying our internal expertise beyond our organisation. We have years of experience under our belt, and being the first price comparison website in the UK, we have a lot to offer the industry. While we effectively display our product knowledge on our site to help customers in finding suitable cover, we identified a gap in having a distinct B2B voice.”
This is where Confused.com reached out to us to help them develop their B2B, thought leadership content. The objective of our work together was threefold:
Increase Confused.com’s topical authority in the B2B insurance space by ranking for specific keyphrases
Build up the profiles of key internal experts
Create content that positioned Confused.com as a thought leader in the B2B space
Ciara explains: “Our challenge was to showcase our experts and give them a platform to contribute to discussions and further establish our credibility in the insurance industry.”
The results: better topical authority, more established expert profiles and a becoming a B2B thought leader
1. Increase and improve Confused.com’s topical authority in B2B insurance
After recent core updates launched by Google, the search engine updated their search rater guidelines to assess content for experience. This joined the existing considerations of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness to create E-E-A-T.
Google’s announcement on the introduction of experience states “Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced? There are some situations where really what you value most is content produced by someone who has first-hand, life experience on the topic at hand.”
For example, if you’re an investment platform writing content about the tax implications of investing, is the content being written by someone who’s an expert in the field of investing and has first-hand experience that is clearly demonstrated in the content?
While Confused.com’s SEO team works directly on B2C content, we were brought in to help specifically support B2B thought leadership content.
When assessing content, Google wants to see that you are demonstrating EEAT that’s relevant to the subject matter area. Part of our process was to interview Confused.com’s experts to understand the topics that are most relevant to them, but also topical and searched for online.
Following this process, we were able to work with the Confused.com team to create B2B insurance content that ranks on the first page above websites like the Forbes, McKinsey and Deloitte, for key B2B phrases such as:
Future of car ownership
Car as a service
Price walking
GIPP insurance
You can read these articles here:
Although it’s far too early to see a correlation with Confused.com’s overall results (and it would be difficult to prove), there’s no doubt that ranking for more relevant keyphrases will only help build Confused.com’s topical authority in the insurance sector.
2. Build up expert profiles with high quality content
The experts on the Confused.com team know a lot about the insurance space. They’re often quoted in the news, asked to feature on TV and share their thoughts on topics like the cost of living crisis, inflation and getting the best car insurance.
When you’re reading content on an important, personal and sometimes sensitive topic like personal finance or insurance that can have a fundamental impact on your life or your finances, you want to know that the person who's writing the content is an expert.
If someone’s telling you to apply for insurance 3 weeks in advance of the start date, you want to read more about who’s saying that so you not only know it’s true but that they’re a legitimate source. This is why financial services content (Your Money or Your Life, as Google calls it) is held to a higher standard and why it’s even more important that it’s clear that the content comes from expertise.
The Confused.com team already does a great job of doing this for B2C content. We wanted to do the same for B2B content, by focusing on a select few experts, generating content ideas based on interviews with them and helping them create the content themselves.
Google mentions in its documentation for assessing content quality that they want content to be “written or reviewed” by the experts. As per their evaluation guidelines, all the B2B thought leadership insurance content we helped create came directly from the Confused.com experts themselves. Our role was to help them decide on topics, put together a structure for the content and refine the articles once they were written by the experts.
Each of the experts we've worked with at Confused.com now has 5+ expert-based articles to their name. We’ve been able to tackle complex and relevant current topics, such as:
These are not topics that can be written with just Google research. True thought leadership content must come from a thought leader who has something to say. Supporting the experts by allowing them to write the content and letting us refine and polish it allowed us to help them create high quality content on relevant B2B insurance content.
Some of these articles have then been linked to by reputable sites and the experts are often asked to appear on TV (although this happens separately to the content). The experts also share these pieces of thought leadership on their social accounts, helping further establish their profiles.
3. Position Confused.com as a B2B thought leader
Confused.com now has over 20 pieces of expert-based content on their website, covering complex, relevant, expert-based content.
Obviously, it’s hard to measure whether someone is a thought leader, and we won’t be able to measure that for years. But what we can say is that Confused.com is now doing more than content just for consumers. They are becoming a thought leader in the PCW and insurance space.
The intangible benefits include:
Recruitment: people like working for leaders in their industry.
Partnerships: being seen as having the first mover advantage makes it easier to form partnerships.
General credibility: in the competitive and ever-changing world of consumer insurance, having a high level of credibility is crucial.
As Ciara says: “Investing in our experts and showcasing their knowledge can really help us embed our position across the insurance industry”
How did we do it? Recurring interviews and thorough writing process
Here’s how we did it:
A content strategy based on expertise
Right at the start, we sat down with the Confused.com experts to ask them about what topics should be covered, trends in the industry and questions people in the industry are asking. This helped direct the strategy and decide on the topics and angles to cover.
From there, we set up recurring meetings with each expert every few months where we would ask about what they were seeing in the news, what topics were covered at conferences and what their fellow insurance professionals wanted to read about. Our strategist Elliot McGuire, would work with each expert to help create the content. During these interviews, Elliot would ask questions like:
What are some of the key trends in insurance?
What are some topics Confused.com has a unique or different perspective on?
What are the most fundamental questions in the industry?
What are your thoughts on the future of insurance?
You can read the resulting ideas and content here: Content from Confused.com Experts
A collaborative writing process
Once we put together the strategy and the topics we would cover, the experts would write most of the content and then send it back to us and our editor, Charlie Jarvis, would refine, edit and publish.
We offered guidance to the experts on how to structure the article, what key points and insights to include and tips to best communicate their thoughts and expertise.
When they sent through the piece to us, Charlie would make sure the writing flowed well, add any information that could complement the article (like statistics from a report) and optimise it for search engines if that was the goal of the article.
The benefit of this approach is that content itself came from real expertise, and we helped set up the processes, polish the content and guide the strategy.
Investing in more expert content helped Confused.com establish itself as a B2B thought leader
It’s a pleasure to work with such an established, well-known and respected brand in the UK. We're excited to continue to help the Confused.com team create expert-backed content to further establish their position in the industry as consumer champions.