Increasing Organic Traffic by 84% YoY through a Local SEO Strategy

The Story

A financial services firm with over 15 offices throughout the U.S., asked us to create a local SEO strategy to improve their local presence in organic search results.

The financial services industry is highly competitive, and it is incredibly difficult to rank for common terms, like “financial planning”, in search results. Our team compiled a customized strategy to increase impressions and clicks for each office location.

The Opportunity

Our client began working with our SEO team in the spring of 2022. Not many of their Google Business Profile listings were claimed, and none of their Bing Places listings were owned. Additionally, their office pages only provided contact information and a brief list of advisors who worked there.

People who are ready to find a financial advisor but aren’t sure what company to use will be searching for local terms, so the company must have a strong presence for localized keywords to gain traffic that can turn into potential clients.

The Strategy

Local Listings

After completing our initial technical audit, our main focus was to improve local traffic. This included claiming and optimizing their Google Business Profile and Bing Places listings. We added tracking parameters to each Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing so we could attribute traffic to each location, rather than looking at it as a whole, to see where we could improve specific listings based on traffic and conversions.

Google Business Profile and Bing Places offer the ability to include descriptions, photos, and additional information - an excellent opportunity to provide potential clients with a high-level understanding of the company and its offerings. We ensured the company description was optimized with strategically selected keywords and followed Google’s best practices for fully setting up the profile and keeping it updated.

Content Updates

A major part of our local organic traffic strategy was revamping the location pages on their site. Since the original pages only had contact information and advisor names, the pages could have been more helpful for users and received more organic traffic.

When crafting new content for the location pages, we focused on providing information that caters to users who are further along in the marketing funnel. This included details such as the company’s service offerings, the advisors at each specific location, photos of the office, and contact forms. Each page had unique content to avoid duplicate text and we included relevant keywords people from each city were searching for.

The Results

We began claiming and optimizing their Google Business Profile listings in the fall of 2022 and implemented the office page project in September 2023.

Looking at September 2023 through March 2024, Google Business Profile website clicks increased by 146% YoY, and organic sessions through Google Business Profile increased by 98% compared to the previous year.

Looking at organic sessions for the location pages, organic sessions through search results (excluding Google Business Profile and Bing Places) increased by 84% from September 2023 through March 2024 compared to the previous year. After implementation, we saw a 91% increase from September to October 2023 and continue to see increases each month. Other pages on the site are also seeing similar increases as a result of the location pages sending strong signals to search engines contributing to more users visiting their website.