Updated on April 15th, 2024 at 10:40 pm
Our experience creating SEO strategies that grow organic search profit and traffic to websites is one of our key strengths.
We have developed growth strategies for websites across many sectors which have massively improved the business’s profitability.
We earned success with the SEO growth strategy on the financial comparison website money.co.uk, this growth helped propel the company forward and ultimately led to the sale of the company for £80+ million to ZPG (Zoopla & Uswitch).
With the site showing signs of growth at the end of 2016 and into 2017 money.co.uk was featured as one of Sistrix biggest winners in SEO growth between January 2016 and January 2017.
Revenue Growth from our SEO Strategy
Our founder, Ben was critical to the SEO team working on money.co.uk which grew the site’s organic traffic and revenue year on year.
| Year | Revenue | Growth vs previous year |
| 2016 | £7.28 million | — |
| 2017 | £11.46 million | 57.41% |
| 2018 | £14.04 million | 22.51% |
Visit Growth from our SEO Strategy
| Year | Visits | Growth vs previous year |
| 2016 | 10.04 million | — |
| 2017 | 16.31 million | 62.38% |
| 2018 | 23.25 million | 42.51% |
Profit from SEO
The figures above give you an idea of the revenue generating potential of SEO gains.
Profit, after direct SEO costs, would have been somewhere in the region of 98.07% of 2018’s revenue figures.
These calculations include rough, up weighted estimates of direct SEO and PR team staff costs, SEO tools and tracking services and some PR budget.
money.co.uk SEO strategy
As 2018 was the year of mobile-first indexing for Google, we decided to focus on improving the experience of the site for those browsing on a small screen device.
This meant, removing superfluous text boxes and above the fold blockers to the “main” content of our pages, which was very often our comparison product.
Here are examples of the types of content that helped to make up the money.co.uk content strategy.
In doing so we drastically dropped bounce rate, improved time on site and also improved the number of visitors who ended up clicking out of the site.
Improving engagement metrics as we did caught the attention of Similarweb, a website that tracks user engagement across websites in different sectors. Given our design changes had such a positive impact on user engagement, we won the Similarweb award for the best SEO for financial services SEO strategy in 2018.
A Search Engine Optimisation Strategy for You
For us, being strategic isn’t about automatically adopting the latest marketing tool, suite or feature in Google.
It is, instead, about keeping pace with the latest developments in your sector and identifying changes that we can make ahead of time to ensure that your website is in the best possible place to achieve beneficial growth.
With a strategy, which incorporates website auditing, technical SEO, strategic content creation and link building, we can help your business grow within your sector or cross into new sectors to grow and develop your business against competitors in a new space.
Let us know if you want to chat through an SEO strategy for your business.
Why Website Growth is Important
Growing your website is important because it helps you to;
- attract visitors grow traffic, leads and sales for your website
- gain visibility from users who are close to conversion
- target demographics and increase your market share
- take on your competitors
- drive business growth
Websites tend to exist in quite binary states in the eyes of search engines, commonly, they are either in a state of growth or are experiencing a phase of decline.
One of the most effective and sustainable methods to help your website grow is SEO.
Here is how to grow your website traffic in the financial services sector.
How SEO can Help Businesses Grow
SEO can help your business grow by adding value and substance to the valuable intangible assets that make up your organisation. Scaling these digital assets is cost effective because they require;
- low upfront investment
- can provide exponential growth
- can be repeated and reused again and again
Successful businesses are growing website traffic by creating engaging content that helps the organisation reach their target audience online.
We can help you define and execute a successful SEO website growth strategy that will help your web pages rank higher in search engines, drive more sales and will fit in with your existing digital campaigns.
Types of Growth Available to Websites Through SEO
SEO strategies can be fantastic at promoting growth for your website. Whether you are a new website looking to scale or an established business with an onsite presence there are two main ways to build and sustain traffic growth for your website.
Lateral Growth
Lateral growth is trying to increase traffic to your website through lateral expansion of keywords. This means creating content to broaden the keywords that your website ranks for and increase the overall count of keywords driving traffic to your website.
This is usually best implemented on sites that;
- are freshly published with a low number of pages
- detail only core services or products with little supporting content
- there are clear content gaps that are missed opportunities and could be filled by development of content pages
Lateral growth will aim to expand the overall size of your website, increasing the number of website pages so that your brand and content is seen by users on search engine results pages where you weren’t previously listed.
Advantages of Lateral Growth Strategy
The benefits of a lateral growth strategy include;
- access to new audiences on relevant keywords
- a choice of keyword intent types; choose high transaction intent for sales growth, commercial intent keywords to attract users in the research phase or informational keywords to explain more to a user about your product or service and make your brand more recognisable.
- May be possible to implement this strategy without too much development work.
- If done correctly, you can warm users up to your product or service in a subtle, measured and journeyed approach to the buying phase. Using your content to engage with users at specific points through their decision making process.
- Multi-purpose content can be shared across channels like; social media and newsletters to maximise the immediate value.
Disadvantages of Lateral Growth
There are a few disadvantages to a lateral growth strategy, these include;
- Time; it will take a long time to thoroughly research and produce a content plan to drive the growth. There is usually a lead out time required on the research phase of a lateral growth plan before production can begin.
- Investment upfront; it’ll take a substantial investment in the research phase as well as investment in content writers, web designers and developers to create this content over a number of weeks or months.
- Technical issues could inhibit content performance if the site structure or page hierarchy of your site is undefined
In reality, if you’re a new brand or just launching your web presence, your best option is to prioritise a lateral growth strategy, unless you are looking to build brand awareness through other marketing channels.
Vertical Growth
A vertical growth strategy is better for established brands and will focus on improving the positions of keywords, usually across the website. A vertical growth strategy should mean you see your website ranking more often in high positions for existing high value and competitive keywords that already deliver leads and clients to your website.
You may have an established site with over 300 pages, you may rank position 25 for a highly relevant, highly valuable keyword related to your business.
A vertical growth strategy would focus on trying to shift the ranking positions of these keywords upwards (closer to 0) to gain more impressions and visits from customers searching for valuable keywords.
Advantages of Vertical Growth Strategy
The benefits of implementing a vertical growth strategy include;
- Results can be faster; if your business has an established web presence and ranks well for certain, relevant keywords, growth into page 1 can be achieved fairly quickly.
- Content updates and refreshes can produce results; so new content may not be required. Very often the best growth is achieved by regenerating old content pieces and retargeting them to cover more relevant and valuable keywords.
- You have the potential to get more sales more quickly; plus the value of your sales could increase.
Disadvantages of Vertical Growth
There are some disadvantages too, the predominant examples include;
- Your domain will need to have the authority to rank on competitive keywords; if you’re operating on a fresh domain or a low authority domain, then a vertical growth strategy probably won’t work for you.
- Easy opportunities may be missed; you might miss out on easy content, product or service growth opportunities if you focus only on a vertical growth strategy and ignore the opportunities available to you through content production.
- may require investment in page redesigns, development of new tools and services to help your website compete with other established brands.
- Sitewide technical issues may inhibit the performance of pages if they’re not dealt with.
- More difficult to coordinate content optimisations with promotion of content across additional channels as vertical growth is normally iterative.
Ultimately, the best website growth strategy to promote your business and improve the quality, quantity and value of your traffic is to choose a strategy that works best for the type of site you are working with and borrow elements of the alternative strategy to support your activity.
I.e. if you opt for a lateral growth strategy on a new domain, ensure that you add internal links to product pages and related content as you go. Periodically monitor page performance in search console and retarget and reoptimize pages based on keywords that offer better opportunities.
If you choose a vertical type strategy, supplement existing content optimisations and retargeting with a keyword research or competitor analysis project to identify any potential new content areas where you could easily move into to generate additional traffic.
We can help you determine which approach will best suit your current web offering and fit with your marketing strategy.
Define a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing can grow your website visitors and increase your traffic.
We can help you develop an SEO growth strategy whatever phase of business you are at, for example;
- Businesses with Established Digital Presence; we can identify valuable keywords already driving sales to an established organisation and help you win new customers by finding additional valuable keywords that help you reach new audiences and gain more visitors through a vertical growth strategy.
- New websites; If you are a new company with a new website, we can help identify low competition keywords to produce relevant content that can help you quickly increase traffic to your pages and attract people that can be converted into potential customers through a lateral growth strategy.
We will help you solve problems with technical SEO along the way.
Contact us today for a no-obligation discussion on how to grow SEO for business owners like you define target keywords, drive traffic to your site and complement your ongoing effort.
Published on: 07/01/2020
