Financial Services SEO Case Study – From Zero to 25,000 Ranking Keywords

The financial industry is amongst the most challenging and profitable areas on the internet.

This client came to us with a relatively fresh start, with little traffic to begin with.

In this case study, you will learn how we radically increased their overall number of keywords AND brought in an estimated $350,000 worth of traffic – each month!

Background

The owner was aggressive and wanted to compete with the biggest names in his niche.

The site launched in July 2017 and grew to roughly 13,000 visits per month before jumping on a Snap Managed SEO plan in October of the same year. 

We worked with the customer to make an aggressive strategy, beginning with a $4,200 / month funding, progressively working around $56,000 per month as results came (this is how you scale).

The SEO Audit

This website had no preceding penalties because it was comparatively fresh.

We did see it had some competitive anchor texts making up 7 percent of their profile; however, we knew we had the funds to diversify.

“Easy Wins” Keyword Analysis

We discovered 230 “Easy Wins” keywords ranking in positions 4-30 with volumes ranging from 20 to 11,000 MS.

We knew we could focus on these keywords because they were already ranking at the top to get some rapid traffic boosts!

These keywords had a CPC, indicating that they were being bid on in Google Ads and would be worthwhile to rank for. Several of the lower volume keyboards were incredibly profitable, with CPCs reaching $20 per click!

We put this all into consideration when choosing keywords & page goals, as many pages ranked for many keywords.

Additionally, by sharing this information with the client, they optimized their pages using LSI keywords to increase their rankings.

Competitive Gap Analysis

This analysis is intended to help us find keywords your competitors are now rank for that you aren’t. These keywords are fantastic for creating a lot of new content ideas!

We began by identifying over 1000 keywords that competitors were pursuing that this site was not. 

We identified three types of content to target and utilized each at different strategies over the course of this campaign:

Category Pages

These are broad, high-volume keywords that cover a wide range of topics.

Product Review Pages

We were able to discover many valuable branded and product terms to analyze. We used this to create a considerable volume of revenue-generating content.

Supporting Content

Later in the campaign, after we completed a multitude of base content, we also began creating supporting content for high competition keywords.

For example, we would support a broad category keyword with contextually relevant articles linked to a high competition keyword article, building the foundation for the rankings. Often, they were niche, avatar-specific, or situational variants of hub pages.

Kicking Off The Financial SEO Campaign

Almost all of our strategies include creating a variety of high-quality links and content – the bread and butter of SEO.

We shift the money into higher quality/more powerful links or additional content as the campaign progresses.

As you can see from the examples below, we relied extensively on natural white-hat blogger outreach and a lot of blog material to generate more traffic to this site!

Here are some of the monthly expenditures as the campaign progressed:

This campaign began with a wide range of products, including diversity links, Blogger Outreach Guest Posts, and content.

• 2X Large Diversity Links
• 1X Small Diversity Link Building Packages
• 2X DA20 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 3X DA30 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 2X DA40 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 7X Snap Blogger – 1000 Words

We added additional content and switched to higher-quality content as the campaign went, for example:

• 5X Large Diversity Link Building Packages
• 10X DA30 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 15X DA40 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 5X DA50 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 16X Snap Blogger – 1000 Words

Then, as we saw the effectiveness of content ranking and the wide range of targeted keywords to rank for, we allocated even more funding into content while continuing to generate high-quality links.

• 4X Large Diversity Link Building Packages
• 10X DA40 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 20X DA30 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 1X DA50 Blogger Outreach Guest Posts
• 40X Snap Blogger – 1000 Words

Results

The success of this campaign was due to a well-defined plan, execution, and excellent communication with the customer. 

This site rose to become a major contender in the field in little than a year, ranking for some of the most competitive keywords.

The current traffic value of the site is estimated to be $351,000 per month:

It ranks for over 25,000 keywords, and the traffic graph has increased significantly in the last year:

Conclusion

The campaign was incredible for us, not just because of the work done but also because of how close we were able to collaborate with the client. 

The client trusted us to follow the procedure, but he also collaborated with our team to pick high-value targets to focus on as the campaign developed. 

Furthermore, because of the higher spend level, our team was able to compile an additional analysis of competitors, which provided insights to the client that helped beyond the search element of this campaign and influenced business choices.

Do you want to dominate a competitive online space? Contact us right now!