Performance Snapshot
Within the first nine months of the SEO campaign, the project demonstrated measurable and commercially relevant growth across all core acquisition metrics:
- Organic sessions: +142% YoY
- Top-10 keyword visibility: from 18% to 46%
- Qualified leads from organic search: +97%
- Average cost per lead (organic): –38%
- Revenue attributed to organic traffic: +164%
These results were achieved without reliance on branded traffic growth, ensuring scalability and long-term sustainability.
Client & Market Context
The client is a mid-sized international CFD and Forex brokerage, operating in a highly competitive, regulation-sensitive financial services market. The website targeted retail traders across multiple English-speaking regions, with a strong emphasis on performance marketing, compliance, and trust signals.
The market environment was characterized by:
- Aggressive competition from established global brokers
- High CPC inflation in paid channels
- Strict regulatory constraints on financial content
- Low tolerance for technical or UX deficiencies
Organic search was identified as a strategic channel to reduce dependency on paid acquisition while improving lead quality.
Initial Situation & Core Challenges
At project kickoff, the website faced several structural and strategic issues:
- Fragmented keyword targeting with heavy cannibalization
- Overreliance on branded and semi-branded queries
- Weak visibility in high-intent transactional clusters (e.g., account types, platforms, spreads)
- Technical SEO debt impacting crawl efficiency and indexation
- Content misalignment with user search intent and compliance requirements
Primary goals were defined as:
- Increase non-branded organic traffic in Tier-1 markets
- Improve rankings for commercial and comparison-based queries
- Grow compliant, high-intent lead volume from SEO
- Build a scalable content and internal linking framework
SEO Strategy & Planning Framework
The SEO approach was built around three strategic pillars:
1. Semantic Market Expansion
- Full keyword universe mapping across informational, commercial, and transactional intent
- SERP segmentation by regulatory sensitivity
- Creation of topic clusters around platforms, instruments, fees, and trading conditions
2. Technical & Structural Optimization
- Architecture redesign to support scalable landing pages
- Crawl budget optimization for priority URLs
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals improvements
3. Authority & Trust Signals
- White-hat link acquisition from finance-relevant publications
- Strengthening E-E-A-T signals through expert-driven content
- Enhanced on-page compliance blocks and disclosures
Execution & Implementation
Technical SEO
- Resolved indexation inefficiencies (duplicate URLs, parameter bloat)
- Improved Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) by 41%
- Implemented schema markup for reviews, FAQs, and financial products
- Optimized mobile UX for conversion-focused pages
Semantic & Content Development
- Produced 120+ SEO-driven pages, including:
- Platform comparison pages
- Trading instrument hubs
- Fee and spread explainers
- Rewrote legacy content to align with search intent and compliance language
- Introduced modular content blocks for rapid scaling
Internal Linking & UX
- Built a hierarchical internal linking system based on intent depth
- Reduced orphan pages by –86%
- Improved average pages per session from 2.1 → 3.4
Off-Page & Authority Growth
- Secured backlinks from:
- Financial education portals
- Market analysis blogs
- Neutral trading review platforms
- Average referring domain authority increased from 42 → 56
Results & Business Impact
Visibility & Traffic Growth
| Metric | Before SEO | After 9 Months | Change |
| Monthly organic sessions | 38,000 | 92,000 | +142% |
| Keywords in Top-10 | 640 | 1,820 | +184% |
| Non-branded traffic share | 54% | 78% | +24 pp |
Lead & Revenue Performance
| KPI | Baseline | Post-SEO | Delta |
| Organic leads / month | 310 | 611 | +97% |
| Organic CPL | $64 | $40 | –38% |
| SEO-attributed revenue | Index 100 | 264 | +164% |
Client Feedback
“The SEO campaign delivered not just traffic growth, but a clear improvement in lead quality and acquisition economics. The structured approach to compliance, content, and technical SEO allowed us to scale organic performance without regulatory risk.”
Key Takeaways & Success Drivers
Several factors were critical to the project’s success:
- Intent-first keyword architecture, reducing cannibalization
- Compliance-aware content strategy, enabling scale in a regulated niche
- Tight integration of technical SEO and conversion UX
- Focus on non-branded demand capture, improving ROI stability
The project validated SEO as a core revenue-driving channel rather than a supporting tactic.
Next Steps for Growth
For financial services companies operating in competitive trading markets, this case demonstrates how a structured, regulation-conscious SEO strategy can unlock scalable growth.
If you are looking to:
- Reduce paid media dependency
- Increase qualified trading leads
- Build long-term organic authority in finance
our team is ready to design a tailored SEO strategy aligned with your market, regulatory environment, and business goals.