Background:

Our brief was to build high quality backlinks from a range of new domains for one of the UK’s leading insurance comparison providers. While our general campaign for this client covered a range of products, including car, home, energy and pet products, this particular arm of the campaign focused on their travel insurance specialty.

In search of a wide pool of new domains that could still be relevant to the travel insurance industry, we decided to take the campaign international. This way, we could continue to drive visibility, traffic and trust to the travel insurance product page while also landing relevant coverage. 

A great PR idea has to be relevant to the client, but it doesn't always have to be as straightforward as ‘insurance comparison company tells travellers they must have insurance for summer holidays’. Instead, choosing a topic that affects and concerns people globally meant we could ensure scalability, relevance and outreach potential. 

Strategy:

Our goal was to position the client as a trusted authority on safe travel, while tapping into a genuine concern shared by tourists worldwide.

Reports of tourists being targeted by pickpockets while sightseeing had been popping up more frequently on social media, so we decided to dig deeper. Pickpocketing was the perfect topic for a PR campaign – it’s something travellers are naturally wary of, and because it’s a global issue, it offered huge potential for reach and scalability.

Earning links from international domains was a key objective. These not only help boost a brand’s domain authority and trust signals, but also future-proof it against algorithm updates that prioritise link quality and diversity.

To create the Pickpocket Index, we analysed publicly available data to uncover the global cities where tourists are most at risk, based on real visitor experiences. The aim was to give journalists and readers a data-driven campaign that shone a light on personal safety risks abroad.

The campaign wasn’t just about raising awareness – it also encouraged travellers to take sensible precautions, including getting the right travel insurance, aligning perfectly with the client’s brand values.

We started by identifying the ten most popular European countries for tourists, such as Italy, France, Spain and Portugal. From there, we compiled the top five sightseeing spots in each country.

We then reviewed online feedback for each attraction – including iconic sites like the Trevi Fountain, Eiffel Tower and the Red Light District – and calculated the number of “pickpocketing” mentions per million visitors. This allowed us to identify the most targeted tourist spot in each country, as well as the overall pickpocketing hotspot in Europe.

Because the data was international rather than UK-specific, we could pitch the story to media outlets all over the world, providing both insights and safety advice for a global audience. To make the findings even more appealing to journalists, we designed a clear, eye-catching digital graphic that visualised the hotspots.

Throughout the process, we worked closely with the client to keep messaging on-brand and ensure the campaign delivered genuinely valuable, practical advice to travellers.

Results:

Since we first pitched the Pickpocket Index in 2023, it has secured 385 items of coverage, including 132 follow links and 88 nofollow links. Coverage came from international publishers and journalists across Spain, Italy, Germany, and the US.

This helped boost the client’s referring domain diversity – a crucial SEO ranking factor. It also increased the brand’s visibility in non-UK search results, supporting their global organic growth.

Overall, earning coverage from authoritative sources allowed the brand to hit both SEO and PR targets, while keeping messaging consistent and driving valuable traffic to key product pages.

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