SEO News

NerdWallet, a financial information and product comparison site founded in 2009, achieves the greatest share of organic search for typical personal finance keywords such as ‘bank accounts’ and ‘credit cards’. 

Not only does it outperform them, it absolutely destroys them. NerdWallet has an incredible 22.3% share of all organic search traffic for personal finance keywords.

And NerdWallet isn’t the only comparison site to perform better than the major finance firms. Creditcards.com – the second best performing site – has a 15.03% share. 

By contrast, Bank of America – the best performing bank in terms of organic search – has just a 6.12% share. 

In this post I’m going to delve into the report from Linkdex and find out how and why these comparison sites are so far ahead of the competition. 

Is it a simple case of evolution? Newer, faster species outrunning the dinosaurs?

The research

The research looked at 5,000 keywords encompassing more than 7.5m monthly searches in the US throughout 2015. 

Keywords included all popular personal finance words and phrases such as ‘bank accounts’, variations on those such as ‘best student bank accounts’, and long-tail search terms such as ‘best 0% credit cards for travel’.

Check out the report for the full methodology.

What is NerdWallet doing right?

It seems like NerdWallet puts a lot of time and effort into creating content that appeals to its target audience, i.e. normal people searching for straightforward advice about financial products.

Let’s take a deeper look at the different types of content the brand puts out… 

Blog content

The blog content is excellent, not only in terms of the content itself but also in the way it is formatted. 

Each post answers a common question about personal finance, such as how to choose a balance transfer credit card.

There are also a number of list posts, such as ‘Top 10 credit card deals of 2016’, which in many cases are essentially just rehashes of results from the NerdWallet comparison tool, but presented in a different way that also happens to be search-engine friendly. 

The formatting, while not perfect, provides a fairly decent user experience.

Lots of subheadings, short paragraphs, plenty of white space, good use of bullet points, key points highlighted, and the copy itself is simple and easy to read.  

Video content

Again, NerdWallet proves it knows its market. Students or young people looking to get their first bank account or credit card, for example, are likely to be interested in video content about starting their first job.

The speakers in the video below don’t look like bank managers. They look like ordinary people who the target audience could relate to. 

It’s free of technical jargon and non-patronizing – both of crucial importance.

The next video follows a similar format: people talking to the target audience from the same position as them, i.e. recent graduates talking to recent (or soon-to-be-recent) graduates about an issue they are likely to be worrying about. 

Social content

Granted we’re talking about organic search traffic here, so you might question my inclusion of social content. 

But a brand’s reputation on social media can spill over into the SERPs. If you see a list of results on Google and one of them is a brand you’ve previously engaged with on Twitter, you could argue you’re more likely to click that link. 

NerdWallet takes a non-technical, human-feel approach to its social media activity, something vitally important for the type of product we’re dealing with here. 

It tweets about football, for example:

Our investor @JoeMontana on the coin toss! #SB50 pic.twitter.com/XwtgBUFXEK

— NerdWallet (@NerdWallet) February 7, 2016

And it publishes behind-the-scenes images (with not a stuffy corporate type in sight), adding to the human feel of the brand:

Nothing says “employee appreciation” like your management team serving you breakfast! #NerdLove2016pic.twitter.com/WGii5Yxx0X

— NerdWallet (@NerdWallet) February 9, 2016

All of this projects an image that is in direct contrast with the old-fashioned, suit-wearing finance industry and appeals to ordinary people. 

Conclusion: content and UX pays off

It’s impossible to say for definite why the big banks are failing to keep up with their younger rivals, but it is likely a combination of superior content and a much more customer-centric approach to user experience (UX) on the part of the high-performing price comparison sites. 

Linkdex’s global head of digital says:

There’s a huge amount of money being fought over by some of the world’s biggest brands in a very narrow space. Yet the landscape is changing, and players like NerdWallet are demonstrating how simply having a strong content strategy and good SEO can disrupt an entire market.

The banks and traditional institutions in the space will need to carefully consider – and potentially radically transform – their long-term digital strategies if they want to maintain market share. 

For more about financial services content and SEO, check out these posts…

• Eight surprisingly interesting examples of finance content
• Top SEO tips for your international financial services websites
• How Standard Life transformed into a customer-centric finance brand

Posted by jmodjeska

Today I’m proud to announce some new features in Moz Pro that help you get a lot more value out of your keyword rankings reports. You can now view your full rankings history for any campaign, select specific date ranges for your charts and tables, better segment your rankings data to get a clearer understanding of your performance and visibility, and effectively manage large campaigns with numerous keywords. Did I also mention it’s lightning-fast? To get started, visit the keyword rankings page in any of your campaigns or test drive Moz Analytics with a free trial today.

Want a quick recap? Tori goes over the highlights in this quick 1:20 minute video!

Historical rankings: getting from 12 to infinity

The major value of today’s release is that it enables customers to visualize their campaign’s entire rankings history. This is thanks to an ongoing effort to completely overhaul our data assembly architecture. I’m excited about today’s release because it lets loose the first phase of this overhaul initiative, and marks the end of the 12-cycle limitation in our rankings reports.

As of today, timeframe selection has no bounds. You can report on rankings data with start and end dates anywhere in the life of your campaign, up to and including the entire campaign’s history, even on campaigns with long histories and lots of keywords. Your full rankings histories have been liberated.

12 weeks of keyword rankings history in Moz Analytics — a limitation until today

Success! A campaign’s entire rankings history in Moz Analytics

And more new features

In addition to unlimited rankings history, we’re giving users the freedom to compare rankings, search visibility, engine performance, and competitive metrics within customizable timeframes. We want our users’ reporting needs to drive the application, and not vice-versa. Here are some other features available as of today:

• Customizable timeframe selection. In addition to weekly and monthly views, you can now select and display start and end dates, and export reports for specific timeframes. Rankings deltas (changes over time) are now calculated over the duration of the selected timeframe.

Calendar controls to select your data display range

Quick-select menu for common timeframes

• Flexible, universal filtering. Fast response times and full keyword history means no more limits on how you view and filter your data. Use the new universal filter to narrow displayed keywords by locality, labels, and keyword text.

• On-the-fly aggregate calculations. Rankings summaries, deltas, search visibility, and universal results all update on-demand whenever you select a new timeframe.

• Flexible, fast sorting. Data points — like difference between rankings by engine — that previously took so much overhead to calculate that they couldn’t be sorted in-place, are now easily sortable on-demand.

Sort by anything, anywhere

And performance improvements, too

These new features are built on an entirely new architecture. We’ve been running the new and old systems in full parallel mode for about two months now to ensure everything was ready to switch over. This has also given us the opportunity to measure some key performance improvements:

• 30X faster pipeline. Our data assembly and storage processes run up to 30X faster, eliminating delays between data collection and in-app availability. The low latency between data collection and availability is what facilitates the delivery of full campaign histories.
• 20X faster server response times. For most in-app requests, our response times are dramatically faster than the previous system. We’re seeing rankings datasets delivered in 50 ms for average-sized campaigns (compared to 800+ ms in the previous system). We’ve also moved many calculations into the browser, reducing network calls and wait times for filter and sort requests.

Why we did all of this

Rankings data is important to our customers

Keyword rankings data is a core component of the Moz Pro suite of tools. We gather localized and national data on millions of keywords each day across hundreds of search engine locales so that our customers can analyze their SEO keyword performance. Moz Analytics users spend the bulk of their time in the Rankings section, where we present metrics that include mobile and desktop keyword rankings, historical SERP analysis, local and national keywords, search visibility scores, and competitive metrics.

The data was already there

We store deep historical rankings data going back to the moment of a campaign’s creation. While this information has always been accessible via historical rankings CSV downloads, we’ve been aware for some time that this is frustrating and this data would be much more useful in the UI. What held us back was our architecture. If you’re interested in the technical challenges and how we overcame them to deliver these new features, I offer a detailed explanation on our Developer Blog, covering the project background and architecture that makes all of this possible.

Where we’ll go next

We plan to round out our rankings overhaul project with backend and UI updates to the Analyze a Keyword page. We’ll also speed up Page Optimization, at which point the entire corpus of ranking-related data will be on our new platform.

Ultimately, all of our numerous datasets, including crawl and links, will be assembled and stored on the new architecture, unlocking new features and delivering data faster as we go. We’ll continue to be agile and iterative, progressively releasing updates as soon as they’re ready.

So go check it out!

To experience the new features in the rankings section, visit your ranking report in any Moz Analytics campaign. If you’re not already a Moz Pro subscriber, why not take a free trial and see how our software can help you do better marketing? As always, we would love to hear your feedback below.

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