Summary
The ‘SSS’ SEO strategy - Stabilize, Seed, Scale - Repeat In 15 months, Tata Capital saw 64.24% improvement in overall website visits and 243.52% growth in blog visits, impacting growth in the personal, business, and home loan categories.
Challenge
Personal loan, Business Loan, and Home loan as categories were underperforming. There were fluctuations in website visits. A steady and stable growth in traffic was missing. There were multiple technical issues, page speed was not upto the mark and the site was not passing Core Web Vitals criteria. As of Nov - 2020, following were the Visits and Core Web Vitals score in each category Personal loan - Visits - 43,704, CWV - 27 Business loan - Visits - 6,508, CWV - 26 Home loan - Visits - 15,802, CWV - 34 Overall website visits were 288,688
Objective
The objective was to gradually improve visitors on PL, BL and HL categories. 1. Visits on each category should improve by minimum 30% by 2022 financial year end. 2. Maintain consistent growth 3. Improve Page speed and pass the Core Web Vitals metrics
Strategy
Before creating a strategy, the brand and the agency did a root cause analysis. The website had three major issues 1. Content cannibalization 2. Technical issues 3. Not implementing the latest SEO practices We created a strategy that had three parts - Stabilize, Seed, Scale and repeat. Stabilize - Fix the existing technical issues for better crawling, better navigation eventually enhancing user experience. Seed - Implement the latest SEO practices including schema tags, engaging content, page layouts that adheres to both SEO practices and user experience Scale - We implemented a content strategy empowering the blog section of the website with a primary focus on the aforementioned categories.
Data
Consuming content in the BFSI sector can be complicated. Users want content presented in a simple language which is easy to understand and digest. As per Google chrome, when pages pass Core Web Vitals metrics, users are 24% less likely to abandon them. This also leads to more stickiness and user engagement. This led the SEO team to create a content strategy that will be reader friendly while simultaneously working the development and design team to make it presentable. When it comes to SEO, the website needs to be treated like a winning Formula 1 car. Everyone has to come together with their areas of expertise. Even if the contribution is small in size the impact is large in magnitude.
Solution
Results
By repeating our SSS strategy, we were able to improve keyword rankings for our targeted categories. Visits, engagement, user experience gradually improved with improvement in rankings. We surpassed our target of 30% improvement in visits and achieved the following results by 2021- 22 financial year end. 1.Personal Loan - 41.07% improvement in visits, Passed Core Web Vitals metrics with 174% improvement in score. Nov’20 visits - 43,704, Core Web Vitals score - 27 Mar’22 visits - 61,653, Core Web Vitals score - 74 2.Business Loan - 49.94% improvement in visits, Passed Core Web Vitals metrics with 169% improvement in score. Nov’20 visits - 6,508, Core Web Vitals score - 26 Mar’22 visits -9,758, Core Web Vitals score - 70 3.Business Loan - 49.40% improvement in visits, Passed Core Web Vitals metrics with 138% improvement in score. Nov’20 visits - 15,082, Core Web Vitals score - 34 Mar’22 visits -22,532, Core Web Vitals score - 81 4.Blog - 243.52% improvement in visits, Passed Core Web Vitals metrics with 131% improvement in score. Nov’20 visits - 32,742, Core Web Vitals score - 41 Mar’22 visits -1,12,475, Core Web Vitals score - 95 5.Overall website visits - 64.24% improvement Nov’20 - 288,868 Mar’22 - 474, 461
