Online car rental company Vroom Vroom Vroom began in 2002, identifying a good space for a dedicated site to compare and contrast offerings from different sites. Now the company records hundreds of customers a day and is turning over more than $4 million.
But a few years ago, the company ran into a slump and was out of cash. Chief executive Richard Eastes says some old-fashioned SEO got him out of a near-death experience.
How’s the company going?
We’re still growing, getting over 700 customers a day. We still have a small office in Las Vegas and London, but we’re still working on what I could consider a skeleton staff. About 12 of us here, although a couple of those would be part-time and a few sub-contractors.
We just recorded $2 million EBIT, and actual turnover is $4.5 million. But we can tell from our statistics that 40% of revenue is from people searching our brand, so we have great growth in that area.
The company was in a bit of a slump a few years ago, was that right?
The worst time was probably when I first took over. I knew the business was in a bit of a slump, and I knew we only had a handful of customers every day. There was no money in the bank, and we had only three staff.
There was a time where we just didn’t take a salary for a month. Our employee was paid, but we didn’t take a salary.
What was the problem?
We simply didn’t have any money to spend on anything, and we couldn’t even spend money on customer acquisition. We didn’t even have enough money for AdWords simply because we just didn’t have any cashflow, and we were very adamant that we wanted to do everything without any seed money.
Was it a lack of customers, or something else?
It was simply a lack of customers, and we just needed more of them. We knew we were doing something that was worthwhile, it was just a matter of time that customers would start increasing. And we could tell they were – but it was just our SEO that wasn’t very good. And we had to devise a plan.
And you devised a plan to get back on track?
It was a pretty basic plan. One of the first ideas was to just share around the load, so I did a lot of the customer service, we had a programmer who did some other work as well. Hiring more people just wasn’t affordable.
What else did you do?
It was such a new industry at the time, and Wotif were starting with their hotel sites. That started in the late 1990s, but people knew this type of site was out there and wanted similar products to compare car rentals. We needed to get people used to the idea, so we started thinking about search engine optimisation.
How did you go about it?
We had no money, so we just spent time. We had a lot of that, and knew we needed to spend it on using SEO and word-of-mouth. Once we focused on that the customers started rolling in.
We started working on natural search, rather than paid search, and it really got us out of our crisis.
What else did you do?
We wrote articles about renting cars in different cities. So we would write an article about car renting in Perth, and about all the companies that operate there. But not only that, we would look at what you could do on a road trip in Perth, where the best depos are and so on.
We’re no professional writers, but we actually hired someone to work on customer service who was also a journalism student. We wanted to look at those articles as a marketing exercise, and they really helped us out.
Did you spend any effort getting unpaid links?
I spent a lot of time getting links. I literally just called up companies, built relationships with them, and then started working on sharing links.
They have to be companies in the same type of industry, obviously. As an example, I was just talking with a car rental company in New Zealand. We have a few conversations, and then we talk about using each other as a source of links It takes time, and effort, but it doesn’t cost any money and you build relationships you can build upon at conferences and so on.
What advice would you give to other businesses about using SEO?
I would say we’re still beginners at this basic type of stuff, but once the customers start coming in you really need to develop your brand.
The brand name really helps customers over time. You look at a URL like “carhire.com.au”, but it doesn’t get as much traffic because it doesn’t have a memorable brand.
SEO is all about branding. Once you get those customers coming in, they will recognise your name, and it all builds up from there. Search engines can get you out of a lot of trouble.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
