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SEO Case Study

There are two main problems that we face while working with almost any website of a bank or another financial organization:

• Lack of relevant content. Search engine algorithms consider the content on the main pages not quite relevant to the keyword targets. For many clusters of keywords, there are no pages at all.
• Too slow implementation of content and other changes. The texts should be checked by a marketing specialist, a product manager, a lawyer… As a result, the process is very time-consuming. The solution was a new approach to placing SEO pages in the website structure.

Since it was almost impossible to edit the pages of the main banking products (too many approvals), we came up with the following scheme:

• For each priority product page (for example, “Cash Loan”), an SEO copy is created, which differs from the main page by the presence of additional content blocks that improve textual relevancy.
• The canonical tag of the main page contains the URL of the SEO copy, so it becomes non-canonical and is not ranked by search engines, but the SEO copy is ranked instead (it should be noted, that this trick worked until 2018, we do not recommend doing this now).
• To promote other clusters of keywords on the site, SEO landing pages are created and linked to each other. They are not available through the main navigation (the menus in the header and footer of the website), but are linked from the sitemap page. Each SEO landing page contains all the necessary information about the banking product and an application form.

This approach made it possible to get the content approved much faster and create new pages, since the content of the main pages of the website remained practically unchanged.

To ensure that all the numbers on the SEO landing pages (interest rates, application processing times, and others) are up to date, the following solution was implemented:

• For each product, a table with variables was created. We assigned each variable its current value. For example, CREDIT_CARD_MAX_GRACE_PERIOD = 120.
• When developing the content of a page, we put variables instead of numerical values.
• When generating an HTML code, the variables were replaced with actual values.

As a result, there was no need to edit dozens of pages when numbers changed. It was enough just to update the value of the corresponding variable.