Expander

Expander Advisors sp. z o.o. is a pioneer on the Polish financial in-termediation market, and is cur-rently the leader in the selection and delivery of the best financial solutions for individuals and com-panies – mortgages, cash loans, investing savings, and insurance. Recently, Expander has also broad-ened its offer to include real estate from the primary market from all over Poland. According to statistical data provided by www.advancedwebranking.com, over 90% of traffic is generated to sites on the first page of Google search results. This is a huge potential that all sizes of brands often fail to take full advantage of. What will happen when we start effective optimisation, successful positioning for selected keywords and high-quality link build-ing on a website?

Objectives of SEO activities

The main objectives of the SEO activities were:

increasing the organic traffic generated to the site,
increasing the number of conversions that are most valuable to the client – mainly related to the use of calculators and financial comparison engines available on the website,
increasing the overall visibility of the page in the search results,
achieving TOP10 and above for 100 selected keywords.

An indirect goal of the SEO activities was to increase the brand’s recognition on the market among potential Expander customers.

Challenges

At the end of 2018, Expander hired SEOgroup to prepare the right strategy and start comprehensive SEO activities for a new website. The financial market in Poland is an extremely dynamically developing branch of the industry, and so, it encourages many entities to start operating in this sector. As a result, the competition is huge, and is continuously increasing. While conducting SEO activities, we knew that we would have to deal with competitors effectively, and that we would need to actually overtake strong financial services brands in the search results (first and foremost the most popular banks, and numerous loan calculators and loan comparison websites). An undeniable a challenge while conducting activities was to provide high visibility for very general phrases (directly related to offered products, e.g. mortgage loans, cash loans and loan calculators) that are relatively competitive. The selected words also had high potential and a large number of searches, thanks to which in the long term they were intended to generate qualitative organic traffic and conversions on the website. In order to be able to compete with the offers of banks and with other institutions, the key to success is complete, ongoing optimisation of the website, including technical SEO combined with qualitative link building. In a word – SEO 360º.

Implementation

In order to achieve satisfactory SEO results, we first prepared a list of comprehensive optimisation recommendations for the www.expander.pl website, related to both the content and technical aspects of the site. Given the size of the site, the scope of the recommendations was very broad, all the more so because website optimisation is a continuous process and requires systematic updates and implementation of recommendations when needed.

The mostimportant elements that needed to be fixed or introduced were modification of title and meta description tags, creating new subpages, and expanding and updating existing content for positioned keywords. These changes had to be implemented on the website first if we were going to achieve any results. Then, we had to perform and repair existing internal linking, eliminate site map errors, verify and improve the structure of the site and URLs, and make the site mobile compatible. Errors regarding duplication and indexation appearing in the Google Search Console were also fixed. Our SEO activities focused on positioning as many as 100 core keywords as well as specific long tail phrases. All of them had extremely high competitiveness, and thus a large number of searches each month. We selected them with the goal of taking advantage of the full potential of the website. According to statistics, search results found in TOP10 and above have the highest clickthrough rate. That’s why proper selection of phrases with potential and ensuring they’re visible in at least the first 10 search results will allow you to achieve the assumed goal – increase in organic traffic to the page, translating directly into an increase in generated leads, and thus revenues. To make this possible, the second essential aspect of SEO 360º is off-site activities, which is highquality link building based on publishing valuable and engaging content. In order to achieve this goal, we decided to properly diversify the profile of links to the www.expander.pl domain, and enrich it with buzz marketing entries and content articles published on valuable and widely read websites, including on www.hbrp.pl and www.dorzeczy.pl in the economics section.

Results:

172,63%

An increase in or-ganic traffic compared with May 2018

If you want to succeed in SEO, you must be patient. SEO activities are longterm; however, if they’re done professionally, they’ll bring many benefits in the long run. When starting cooperation with Expander, the SEOgroup agency adopted a strategy to ensure the growth of individual KPIs in the longer term while setting the right milestones. To estimate the effects of the activities carried out, May 2018 was used as the reference point. As a result of implementing a detailed SEO strategy, after just five months, the first satisfying results were visible:

TOP10 for 50 out of 100 positioned keywords, including 11 competitive TOP1-3 phrases,
increased visibility for other keywords by 100 in the TOP3 range and 400 in the TOP10 range.

Increasing the overall visibility of the website, positioning it on selected keywords, and qualitative link building translated into increased brand awareness and recognition among consumers.

760,94%

An increase of the total number of conversions compared with May 2018

Summary

Expander is a perfect example of what can be achieved thanks to a properly prepared and implemented SEO strategy, where the first major results can be seen relatively quickly.