Motorpoint

Motorpoint is a UK-based independent retailer of nearly new and used cars, with 21 stores across the country and a strong online and phone-based sales presence. Established in 1998, the company is committed to making car buying as easy and transparent as possible. With growing demands across both customer-facing and internal platforms, Motorpoint sought a CMS that would provide the flexibility, security, and scalability their business required—without adding strain to their lean technology team.

Too many channels, too little flexibility

Motorpoint faced an escalating challenge. With over 20 internal sites and 3 customer-facing platforms, their in-house-built content management system (CMS) was no longer up to the task. The engineering team found themselves stretched thin by not only maintaining the CMS itself, but also managing content across every digital touchpoint, from public-facing websites to internal systems. This added significant overhead, slowing down their ability to scale effectively.

But the main concern wasn’t just scale; it was security, flexibility, and empowering non-technical teams to act independently. Content was tightly bound to bespoke UIs, meaning even routine content updates needed to go through developers.

Neil Gaskell, Head of IT Engineering and Operations, explained how this setup was holding them back: “It took up a lot of time for the engineering team to maintain that, for what I perceived to be very little value at the time.”

He also emphasized that security was a major factor in their decision to modernize: “One of the big reasons for me was security, as well as the separation of functions. Traditional CMSs often have the CMS embedded within the website itself. If someone gains access to your CMS, they essentially gain direct access to your website and its codebase, which is a serious security concern. It also adds unnecessary complexity to your website and application.”

Motorpoint needed a solution that would provide the flexibility and security necessary for both their technical and non-technical teams to thrive.

Behind the build: How the team set the stage for scale

After evaluating multiple options, Motorpoint chose Kontent.ai as their headless CMS, with a clear objective: to separate content from presentation and create a more agile, scalable ecosystem across their business that would cater to both technical and content teams.

Their engineering team began by designing a structured content model in Kontent.ai, ensuring content could be reused and managed across all platforms. By carefully designing content models, Motorpoint has ensured that information can be consumed by multiple applications, each with its own intention for the data, not limited to just displaying it on screen. This allows regular activity undertaken by business users to change platform behaviors whilst keeping information fresh.

“We’ve been able to halve the engineering time required to build something, because we no longer build admin functions. We plug our systems into Kontent.ai instead,” Neil said. “We just manipulate the data models to represent whatever it is we’re trying to do.”

From bottlenecks to speed: How Motorpoint improved their workflows

The shift to Kontent.ai gave Motorpoint’s content and SEO teams the freedom to manage and publish content without needing constant developer intervention. Previously, even minor content changes required developers to implement them, which led to slow turnarounds and bottlenecks. 

With Kontent.ai, content teams can now independently launch campaigns, update logistics information, and manage digital assets—without compromising on governance or safety. This independence was crucial in accelerating their workflows.

As Neil Gaskell said, “Now, what you have is a very large technical ecosystem being controlled by people who are not technical—and it can be done safely.”

For the engineering team, this shift meant that they could focus on higher-value tasks instead of being bogged down with repetitive content-related requests. The boost in efficiency was striking: “We’ve seen a 40% increase in engineering throughput. Why? Because we’re building half the stuff we used to. We don’t need to make UIs for everything anymore.”

Streamlined content operations, from draft to delivery

That same shift in autonomy and efficiency extended to Motorpoint’s content and SEO teams. With Kontent.ai, the entire content lifecycle became faster, more collaborative, and easier to manage. Benefitting from the expertise of automotive journalists who joined the business in 2022, the content team works hand-in-hand with SEO specialists to prioritize initiatives based on detailed briefs. Content is drafted, reviewed, and approved directly within Kontent.ai, without switching between tools.

“Kontent.ai allows us to draft, review, and approve content within the platform, removing the need to move between documents and tools,” explained Tim Rodie, Head of Content at Motorpoint.

“The headless CMS design makes it easy for us to create and reuse assets in multiple posts, as well as easily being able to link to and reference previous articles. We also love the reliability of the platform, especially its background auto-saving which means we've had far, far fewer incidents where we've lost work compared to some other platforms.”

The SEO team also benefits directly. “Kontent.ai functionality has become central to how we deliver our content strategy,” said Rainu Bhele, SEO Manager.

The shift to a headless CMS has significantly improved content management across teams. As Rainu shared: “Beyond being able to approve and amend articles, reviews, and onsite copy directly within the platform, I use Mission Control to act as our editorial calendar. It makes it easy to see what has been scheduled at a quick glance. As we have a small content team, this is important so we can make sure that we’re consistent with when we publish new content and update existing articles on the website.”

Internal linking has also been improved thanks to the ‘Used In’ functionality, which allows the team to reference and link existing content—boosting crawlability and speeding up ranking for new articles.

“The ‘Used In’ is helpful as it makes it easy to link between newer and more established onsite content—giving new pages more chance of being crawled quicker, allowing them to rank sooner,” Rainu added.

The SEO impact of content ownership

As Motorpoint migrated their content into Kontent.ai, they focused on replacing hardcoded elements with dynamic, structured content. The transition was seamless for both users and search engines—which was important for Motorpoint to improve performance.

But the long-term SEO impact was even more dramatic. With content now in the hands of Motorpoint's more established content and SEO teams, Motorpoint can test, iterate, and optimize content faster than ever, leading to explosive growth in organic visibility.

Since adopting Kontent.ai and expanding their content strategy, Motorpoint’s content and SEO performance have skyrocketed:

• Seven times more informational content is being published
• Hundreds of commercial pages have been optimized
• Traffic to onsite articles has increased by 600%
• Content visibility has grown with four times more content on page one
• Content ranking in positions one to three on Google has grown by 400%

Behind these impressive numbers lies a broader shift in how the team operates—and as Neil Gaskell put it: “Every company has more work than engineers. If you can empower business users and free up engineering resource where it isn’t essential, you’re able to deliver more, faster.”

One source of truth, endless possibilities

Reflecting on their experience, Motorpoint’s biggest piece of advice to other teams is not to limit their expectations. While Kontent.ai helped solve a major problem, it also unlocked a host of additional benefits they hadn’t originally anticipated.

“We started with a plan to solve one problem. We probably solved 10 to 15. The boundaries are your imagination, not just what’s written on the tin,” shared Neil.

The product, they noted, turned out to be much more versatile than they initially expected, offering capabilities that weren’t necessarily on the product pitch but worked exceptionally well for their needs.

“What we use it for? I’m pretty sure it’s not what the product team at Kontent.ai imagined. But it works brilliantly.”