Scotiabank Chile doubles organic sessions and grows conversions by 50%

About Scotiabank Chile:

Scotiabank Chile is a division of the Canadian multinational company. It’s the third largest bank in the country, and offers a full range of retail, commercial and corporate services, with particular strengths in international trade.

Business Challenge: poor online visibility and customer acquisition

Back in 2017, Scotiabank struggled with customer acquisition. Its website Scotiabankchile.cl had poor content, structure, and UX. The company’s SEO team had no data to work with. Scotiabank’s competitors were much more digitally equipped, and it was time to catch up with them.

The bank was about to start a strong digital transformation, followed by a data-driven SEO strategy for select high-potential banking products.

Solution: data-based content creation, position tracking, and link building

In 2017, Scotiabank’s in-house SEO team started laying the groundwork for the company’s online visibility, dedicating 20% of their efforts to defining a new strategy with a five-year outlook, and 80% to executing the plan.

The new SEO strategy focused on priority products that were identified as a vital part of the Scotiabank Chile’s development: personal loan, insurance, mortgage, credit cards and investment. Their main goal was to differentiate the company from other banks and financial institutions that had three to four times the advertising budget compared to Scotiabank at the time.

“Our goal for every product was different. For example, landing pages for personal loan and banking accounts were designed to generate online lead prospects, whereas car insurance could be bought online. This meant that we could still market them online, but the closing process differed,” explains Erich Dreyer, Search Engine Marketing Manager at Scotiabank Chile. “Our strategy was to rise on SERP and reach the top 3 positions with our priority products."

Scotiabank’s traffic trend

Erich and his team started by optimizing existing content, fixing technical SEO issues, and creating a clean interface. Adding necessary features to the website was the next important step. Since 2017, Scotiabank has launched new digital forms for credit, mortgage and banking account applications. Organic traffic has been the main source to generate these new leads.

In 2019, once the foundation was solid, the company’s yearly SEO strategy grew to include new banking products and categories.

Scotiabank’s SEO team moved on to content creation, better structure of the landing pages, titles, alt text, and schema markup. Equipped with SEMrush tools, Erich picked cohorts of a few dozen keywords for each business category and started tracking them daily in the Position Tracking tool. He used the Keyword Magic Tool for ideas on long-tail keywords, including questions, for content creation and discovering keywords he might not be tracking yet.

Creating quality lead-generating landing pages is a top priority at Scotiabank. To benchmark themselves against competitors, Erich and his team used Domain Analytics: “We are now competing not only with other banks, but with all kinds of finance-related content creators,” says Erich. “SEMrush shows us the possible new competitors, their backlink and keyword strategies. It allows us to bring this information into Scotiabank and modify our strategy or incorporate new tasks into our general strategy.”

Next, Scotiabank’s SEO team concentrated on quality backlinks. They used SEMrush Backlink Gap tool to compare the company with up to four competitor domains and identify the websites that were linking to competitors but not to Scotiabank. Erich then used the easy automated emails feature in the Link Building Tool to reach out to the most fitting domains.

The ability to track featured snippets has been equally helpful: “We show weekly reports with positions of every priority keyword and the kind of featured snippets they trigger to our internal clients,” shares Erich.

Results

90% of Scotiabank’s priority non-branded keywords are now on the first page in Google.: Today, Scotiabank’s average position on SERP is 5, with 57 priority keywords being in the top 3. This is 6 positions up year over year. Scotiabank is #1 in Chile for the most competitive keyword “personal loan”.
Organic sessions doubled year over year, while bounce rate decreased by 11%.
The number of online applications for all products grew by 50%.

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