Finimize provides the tools people need to invest with confidence through bite-sized insights from world-class analysts. Initially launched as a financial newsletter, which migrated into an App, Finimize has since moved to a website model to increase traffic.
Reddico helped us identify easy wins in the early days (there were lots of them!) and built out a comprehensive technical SEO roadmap.
Jason Runyan, Vice-President, Growth Marketing, Finimize
The brief
Finimize’s target audience is largely private investors based in the UK, US, Canada and Australia. A team of journalists and content writers produce 5-10 new articles per day and while the website hosts thousands of pieces of content, the majority sat behind a paywall and were not indexable.
Traffic had historically been largely driven by paid search and social ads, so the client asked Reddico to help them unlock organic growth.
What we did
We started by executing a full SEO audit, to determine the best steps to take to unlock organic traffic.
Our technical audit uncovered:
Due to the paywall, multiple versions of pages were non-indexable and incorrect internal signals were being passed through to the search engines.
Conflicting signals with go.finimize redirected into finimize.com and vice versa.
Low-quality pages across subdomains with Google spending a large amount of time crawling URLs - go.finimize.com caused a lot of issues - a large amount of site bloat and poor-quality signals.
Structural URL issues - finimize.com had a lack of context on URL structures.
A large number of health check areas needed to be improved on - applying self-referencing canonicals, adding site URLs in sitemaps, updating titles/tags, etc.
A total of 8-page speed recommendations needed to be actioned to improve not only page speed but also core web vitals.
Our audit also highlighted some key content areas that needed to be addressed. These items were largely around:
Improvement to the About Us page to include perspectives from history, team and purpose.
Introducing authorship onto articles themselves - who is writing the copy, how can we trust them, what authority do they have?
Adding additional elements in Contact Us information to address missing details on the business.
Moving onto execution, the technical changes included:
Addressing non-indexable content
Removal of missing H2 elements
Noindex query parameter URLs
Noindex/ref pages
Implementation of canonicals on login?/self-referencing canonicals
Other tasks addressed page speed issues such as:
Defer-off screen images
Preload the Largest Contentful Paint images
Remove unused JS
Once the technical foundations were addressed, we then switched our focus to E-EAT and on-page SEO.
The majority of the traffic was driven by branded or news articles, this meant that we needed to look at how we could optimise page types to bring in consistent traffic. This can be in the form of /tag pages where we could optimise these for terms such as ‘apple stock news’, ‘technical finance news’, etc., to increase site visibility.
Our competitor review looked at:
What features were present in competitors' pages
What the intent of the pages was
What the Finimize site was missing
The main considerations were to have clear modules with internal linking opportunities to sub-categories and encourage E-EAT signals such as authorship and date published directly on the listings.
Leading on from the work we carried out not only on the E-EAT analysis but then looking at the /tag pages, we realised that this was a significant opportunity to improve on how we could optimise for trust as well as user experience (UX).
The results
All of this activity meant that when Google’s core updates were released last year, we were seen to have improved both site health and quality, with the project delivering strong results:
We delivered a 7.3x increase in monthly site traffic
We increased page-1 ranked search terms from 147 to 250
Overall average rank position improved significantly from 26.47 to 12.52
The project has also been shortlisted in the European 2024 Search Awards for Best Use of Search, Finance SEO.
Reddico helped us identify easy wins in the early days (there were lots of them!) and built out a comprehensive technical SEO roadmap that we ticked off throughout the year, concentrating on optimisations that improved our visibility and E-EAT signals. Jason Runyan, Vice-President, Growth Marketing, Finimize
