SEO Case Study: How One Advisor Doubled Their Traffic and Reached Page One in a Year

Founded by Managing Director, Marc Westlake CFP TEP, Global Wealth has provided financial services from Dublin, Ireland since 2008. Standing out as Ireland’s only Certified Financial Planners, Global Wealth offers personalized financial solutions through an innovative services structure.

Leveraging Twenty Over Ten’s powerful Website Engine platform and SEO services, Global Wealth planning worked with Twenty Over Ten to tap into its unique strengths and develop an effective SEO strategy. In this case study, we’ll examine the SEO strategies Global Wealth planning used to increase site traffic by over 230 percent and land on the first page of Google’s local search results.

The Top 4 Strategies Used To Skyrocket Global Wealth’s SEO

Global Wealth’s SEO performance comes down to four main strategies — user-focused web design, optimized metadata, blogging, and social media. Each strategy has a number of parts, and neither is mutually exclusive. For this reason, we’ll examine them step by step to see how they influence one another and contribute to improved SEO. Let’s dive in.

1. User-Focused Web Design

Your website is your digital presence. It makes a clear statement to visitors, showcasing your values and services to help them self-qualify. It also acts as a home base for blogs, videos, articles and all ongoing content.

Discussing Marc’s vision, our design team developed a website using the Iris framework. Sections like “How are we different” appeal directly to the ideal audience and let visitors know exactly what Global Wealth has to offer:

The site also puts a special emphasis on Global Wealth’s values, and how they influence both the firm’s team and its founding. These pages set the stage for the tailored solutions that follow, letting visitors know exactly what they can expect before diving into a variety of prices and resources.

Collectively this helps improve SEO in two main ways. First, by showing Google and other search engines that visitors enjoy your website. And second, by providing keywords that target Global Wealth’s niche market.

2. Optimized Metadata

Metadata is the information that Google and other search engines use to understand what our website is about. It is essential to SEO and consists of two sections; title tags and meta descriptions. The keywords in these areas should answer your user’s intent. What are users looking for when they perform a search? Following best practices for title tags and meta descriptions, our team optimized each page of the Global Wealth website using the following criteria:

Title tags. These should include a location, a high-end keyword and the name of the firm to improve localized SEO. Here’s the title tag for Global Wealth’s homepage:

Meta descriptions. This should be a summary of the page and include other audience-specific keywords. This section should also be written as sales copy to incite a reaction. Here’s the meta description for Global Wealth’s homepage:

Collectively, the goal of metadata is to help improve local SEO, allowing users to find Global Wealth through an organic search. To test this out, we went into incognito and searched “Financial Advisor Ireland”, where Global Wealth now appears as one of the first results on page one:

3. Blogging Best-Practices

Blogs are a fantastic SEO tool. They provide the opportunity to add more keywords to your website, demonstrate your authority on a subject and show Google and other search engines that your site is up-to-date.

Working with our team, Global Wealth developed an excellent blogging strategy, providing the biggest SEO benefit on this list. Looking at Global Wealth’s Google Search Console, we can see the top-performing pages on the site, beyond the main page, are all blog posts:

So, what did Global Wealth do to attract so much traffic through blogging? To find out, let’s look at one of the blogs on the above list — “Can I Access My Pension Early?”

First off, the post takes into consideration blogging best practices, including formatting, images, links and metadata. But it’s the more advanced blogging strategies that make the biggest difference. For example, digging into Global Wealth’s Google Search Console, we can see many of the site’s blog posts are receiving inbound links from other sites:

These sorts of links provide a significant SEO advantage, signaling to Google that the Global Wealth website is an authority on financial services. Furthermore, comparing two six-month periods of Global Wealth’s referral traffic shows an overall increase in both new and total users, as well as sessions, as a direct result of these inbound links.

4. Remaining Active on Social Media

Social media indirectly affects SEO. It’s not a ranking factor but can impact the metrics that Google looks at to determine the quality of a page. So we shouldn’t count it out of the picture. After all, social media is a chance to interact with your audience and showcase your firm’s personality. And an increase in engagement on social media can result in an increase in traffic to your website. This increase in traffic is great, but can also signal ranking factors like time-on-page, telling Google that your site is popular, and improving the chances of Google recommending your site on a search results page.

Following our social media best practices, Global Wealth is active on the big three, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:

And, digging into Google Analytics once more, we can see that social media has had a significant impact on overall traffic, increasing the likelihood of the SEO benefits listed above:

The Final Results

SEO is a long-term investment and results take time. We typically recommend 6 to 8 months before seeing any serious changes. Though that timeframe can be shorter or longer. With over a year of data on Global Wealth’s SEO, we can examine the final results of the changes listed above. To do so, we’ll examine the difference between two six-month periods of Global Wealth’s Google Search Console.

Organic Search Traffic increased by over 230 percent:

Clicks represent how often your website is clicked on whenever it appears in a search. This can be translated to organic traffic numbers as it lets us know the number of actual visitors arriving through a search. Looking at the highest performing pages and number of links from the information above, it’s pretty clear that a majority of this traffic is coming from blog resources. The result is a staggering 230 percent increase in traffic from organic searches.

219 thousand more impressions:

Impressions tell us how often your website is seen on a search results page. An increase in impressions often comes from a combination of two factors. Either your content is performing well, improving in rank, and therefore visibility and impressions. Or, your website now ranks for new keywords, increasing the number of overall impressions you receive. Similar to clicks, these keywords are most likely a result of Global Wealth’s optimized blog content.

A small uptick in click-through-rate:

CTR, or click-through rate, represents how often your website is clicked after being seen on a search result page. Typically, there is a decline in CTR whenever impressions increase. This is usually because the website is now ranking for more keywords, but those listings aren’t getting seen. However, this is not the case with Global Wealth. Instead, Global Wealth has seen an increase in CTR. This is most likely a result of a combination of factors, including optimized blogs, and the influence created by social media, and referral traffic listed above.

A slight loss in average position:

Average position represents your website’s average rank in a search result across every keyword you rank for. The goal is to have a very low average position. However, just as CTR is often negatively affected by increased impressions, so too is average position. In this case, though, the difference is not very large. This tells us that Google considered Global Wealth’s content to be of higher quality, by maintaining their ranking.

To confirm this, we can check Global Wealth’s Google Search Console, where we find a piece of content has been selected by Google’s Discover option. This tells us that Google considered Global Wealth’s content to be high quality and has recommended it in Google Search, supporting our conclusion. 

Wrapping Things Up

As this data indicates, an effective SEO plan must be comprehensive. And though blogging was by far Global Wealth’s strongest SEO contributor, it was not alone, as other traffic sources were used to support it. The result was a massive SEO boost for Global Wealth, resulting in over double the traffic and a position on the first page of Google. But don’t take it just from us:

Looking for more information on Global Wealth’s SEO strategies? In a recent webinar, Samantha Russell, Chief Evangelist of FMG Suite & Twenty Over Ten sat down with Marc Westlake CFP TEP to talk about everything SEO. Check out the replay here for more information.