Financial Analysis Firm Invests in Impression for Relevant and Quality Links
AskTraders reached Impression with a view to improving their backlink profile in a way that would support their SEO needs.
AskTraders
AskTraders is a financial analysis firm that supports finance professionals and amateurs in managing their money effectively through the provision of advice and connections to trusted brands.
The Challenge
AskTraders had been working with various PR agencies prior to approaching Impression and while the coverage achieved was pleasing, the impact on search rankings was lacking. They approached Impression with a view to improving their backlink profile in a way that would support their SEO needs – something that perfectly suits Impression’s integrated approach.
Noting the YMYL (your money or your life) nature of AskTraders’ product, Impression was quick to spot the issues in the existing backlink profile, most notably the prevalence of comment-led links which, though good for the brand, were not hitting the relevance and quality of links the brand would need to grow moving forward.
Incorporating their client’s ongoing aspiration for brand building coverage alongside the SEO need, their job was to:
- Earn links from highly relevant publications in the finance sector
- Earn links from high profile/quality/DR websites through finance-relevant content
AskTraders elected to retain a PR agency alongside Impression that would manage all reactive and comment based opportunities so their focus was on more campaign driven work.
The Strategy
Impression believes in the benefits of layered strategies, meaning they run multiple campaign activities at once. Not only does this mitigate the risk of lower performing campaigns, it presents a more natural link acquisition journey to Google.
For AskTraders, they operated on a structure of what they call ‘hero campaigns’ and ‘audience campaigns’, the former being focused strictly on finance topics while the latter would explore broader audiences through more mass appeal style content. Hero campaigns were larger investments often requiring data, visualisation or large scale analysis, while audience campaigns can be turned around in shorter periods. Underlying all of this was the reactive work of the other agency.
Over the course of 6 months, they ran two hero campaigns focused on foreign exchange and then on banking. They also ran a series of audience campaigns including a review of football transfer rates aligning with the transfer window closing, an analysis of charity donation data during the Covid-19 pandemic, a survey of attitudes toward cash at the start of lockdown, a review of Google search data to reveal investment trends and an opinion based story reflecting on the impact of the ESMA regulations update on the financial industry.
The Results
The results for their work with AskTraders have been impressive and far exceed the link targets agreed at the start of their tenure. On average across quarters, they exceeded expectations by 166% in terms of link numbers – while the relevance and quality of coverage is indicated by the high average DR but also by placements in highly relevant publications including:
- The Telegraph
- Yahoo Finance
- MSN
- Metro
- Express
- Global Banking and Finance
- Business Money
- Fintech Finance
- Wealth Investor News
- Trading News
The site has also seen a significant increase in SERPs visibility which, while not completely down to links, is representative of the power of an integrated approach:
Key Stats
- Number of links so far: 110
- Average DR so far: 68
About Impression
Impression is a multi-award winning digital agency, specialising in the delivery of high performance campaigns across SEO, PPC, analytics and digital PR.
