money24.es is a comparison website allowing its users to filter and compare quick online loans offered by various companies. Having some experience on the Polish market, the client wanted to expand into the Spanish market. To achieve this goal, Money24 asked us to help them get their website noticed by search engines.
Apart from increasing the visibility on Google and other search engines, we were also asked to bring more organic traffic to the website. At the time the client contacted us, the monthly unpaid traffic on money24.es equaled 6, which constituted no more than just 1.1% of the overall traffic that the website generated.
Optimize a financial service website for the Spanish market? Why not! My SEO team pulled out all the stops and there we were: a higher position in SERP and boosted organic traffic. Spending loads of time on implementing technical improvements clearly paid off.
The first thing we decided to handle was the alarmingly high number of 404 errors.
If there are just a few invalid URLs within a domain, it shouldn’t be considered a big issue. However, if there are as much as 854 of such broken links on just one website, the problem is more than serious. With so many errors, the average session duration on money24.es was short.
From what we discovered, those errors stemmed from the redirections set on other websites that took the traffic to money.24.es. Following our recommendations, the website owner deleted these broken redirections.
Once the 404 Not Found error issue was tackled, we proceeded to tweak the text published on the homepage.
Even though the client was publishing new pieces of content pretty regularly, none of them was properly optimized for the search engines. As a result, their potential wasn’t used.
Our SEO strategy for the homepage was as follows: optimizing the web content for selected keywords to generate more impressions and gradually make the very keywords reach higher positions. By adding headings, building the internal linking and using formatting, we also attempted to strengthen the overall rating of the homepage.
Naturally, the remaining pieces of writing published on other pages (including the company blog) were also modified for SEO.
The content optimization wasn’t all we could do to help money24.es perform better in search engines. We had yet another thing up our sleeve – long-tail keywords.
We considered long-tail keywords as another way to drive more organic traffic to the client’s website. To make the most out of this strategy, we created separate pages and optimized each one for the target long-tail keywords. The content created for those pages was written in such a way to maximize the effects.
Luckily, our client and us didn’t have to wait long to see the positive outcomes of our strategy. Week by week, the new content optimized for the long-tail keywords was generating more and more visits.
The fourth and the last thing that required our attention was the internal linking. It wasn’t build correctly, and therefore negatively affected our client’s website.
The majority of links inserted in blog posts led to non-existent pages, resulting in 404 errors. There were two big downsides to this:
1. the link equity wasn’t passed from one page to another, and
2. the number of 404 errors was growing.
As we found out, the main reason for that was that the links used in anchors were incomplete, often containing “…” instead of letters. Here’s an example:
https://money24.es/creditosi-dinero…ne-y-sin-papeleo/
instead of
https://money24.es/creditosi-dinero-rapido-online-y-sin-papeleo/
The on-site strategy, even if it’s well-thought-out, rarely suffices unless it’s combined with a link building strategy. From the very start we were developing a net of referral links, receiving them from the quality webpages.
Here’s the external link profile before we took the off-site process over:
and here’s after:
When it comes to the Page Authority and Domain Authority, we managed to improve those metrics as well. Here are the results before we launched the process:
and after 8 months of continuous work:
RESULT 1 Increase in organic traffic. In April 2019, the organic traffic generated 1,484 more sessions than 6 months before.
RESULT 2 Increase in page views and click-throughs
The below graph shows the increase in impressions of money24.es in google.es
RESULT 3 Stronger keyword position
out of index → 2nd place
49th place → 2nd place
out of index → 10th place
out of index → 15th place
