Content strategy refers to the process of creating useful content as a medium to achieve business goals and meet customers or user needs. And part of that strategy at times requires creating research-driven online content that is also optimized for search engines. The broader Citizen’s team was aware that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

I was tasked with supporting the launch of the newly branded Wealth Advisory service offering. With the main goal of building a consistent stream of digital traffic (prospects) that the Bank would convert to “Wealth” customers over time. Since organic (typically) makes up the largest chunk of bank online traffic AND it’s the most “passive” of the primary traffic sources—it’s where the focus of efforts was placed.

Citizens was re-launching their Wealth Advisory services by including more online services, financial products, and financial advisors. The company had also decided to create a microsite within citizensbank.com that would introduce the re-branded Wealth Advisory services to prospective customers.

The challenge was to attract new “eyeballs” to Wealth Services by utilization of the microsite. A microsite that had no traffic and was solely geared to individuals who might not have heard of Citizen’s Wealth Advisory services or maybe not even Citizens itself.

Competitive keyword research and analysis is a powerful strategy to use in SEO. It gives you valuable insight on how and why competing web pages are doing better than you in a Google search and it also gives you the opportunity to identify gaps in their strategy and fill in areas they've overlooked.

In thats effort, I:

• Identified leading Wealth Advisory providers.
• Analyzed their organized traffic share in the Wealth Advisory space
• Focused on traffic share on their landing pages.
• Found over 1,200 wealth related key words to review.
• Looked at Volume, Weighted Scores, Difficulty and CPC.
• Focus on Keyword types:
  • Primary – The Central theme keyword often has high competition
  • Secondary – Related lower competition keywords can “ladder up” to a Primary Keyword
  • Tertiary – Less relevant keywords can still have some “ladder up”potential

• Search volume: The number of search queries for a specific search term in a given search engine such as Google within a given timeframe. The number of search queries is estimated and can vary by season, region or thematic.
  
• Weighted score: The measure of how well the technical aspects and user-facing elements of your website contribute to search engine optimization. A good SEO score is between 80 – 100. SEO scores in this range indicate that your website is meeting the top quality standards for search engine optimization in the areas of technical SEO, content, user experience, and mobile usability.
• Difficulty: Keyword Difficulty (KD) is an SEO metric that estimates how hard it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword. It is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the hardest to rank for.

A meta description (sometimes called a meta description attribute or tag) is an HTML element that describes and summarizes the contents of your page of users and search engines. While meta data isn’t as important for SEO rankings as it used to be, the meta description still plays a significant role in on-page SEO.

Meta descriptions provide the visitor a glimpse of what the page is about in the Search Results (140-160) characters. Search engines in turn use meta descriptions to evaluate webpage content.

I found in my research that:

• Competitors were applying feature-forward keywords in meta descriptions to stand out to visitors and search engines.
• More successful meta descriptions personalize the wealth management and investing experience.
• More successful competitor pages utilize clear and concise meta title tags.

• Fidelity dominates search presence for the mass market.
• Fidelity performs well for mass market terms related to retirement planning and investment as well as 529c.
• Wells Fargo cuts into Fidelity SOV for keywords related to education savings, rollovers and cashouts.
• Short-tail keywords, including Retirement and Calculator with information sites such as NerdWallet and Investopedia.
• Citizens performs best with wealth advisor terms but is eclipsed by Morgan Stanley, Merrill, and Fidelity.
• Less than 1/3 of organic traffic came from Citizens.com pages containing certain competitive terms in the title.

• 20 top key words by category and subcategory for Citizens
  • The keywords are suggestions to used in titles, meta tagging, and throughout page content
  • Keywords sorted by weighted score to ensure that search volume is not only factor
• 15 competitive key words were identified for the Wealth Advisor project.
  • Keywords were sorted out by weighted score to ensure that search volume is not the only factor in determining competition and relevance.

• Improve discoverability and CTR by including high Value Keywords in titles and descriptions
• Apply SEO best practices in title and tags for target keywords
• Include tables, charts, and rich media with clean code to increase chances of rich snippets on the SERP

• Increase supporting Learning Hub content for mass ,market and underserved groups in mind such as retirement planning, small businesses, IRA’s and 401Ks, and related terminology and how tos.
• Attract High-Net Worth clients with Learning Hub content on estate planning to begin client/brand dialogue
• Wealth management content should also appeal to those who think such services are out of reach
• Easily accessible and intuitive calculators related to retirement and investin

• Update Titles and Meta Tags where needed
• Add Schema Markup to Wealth MVP Pages
• Image Optimization to ensure quick loading

This project took place between February 2022 through April 2022. I worked on this project as Sr. Content Strategist aligned to the UX and marketing teams.

I collaborated with the broader New Customer Marketing Team at Citizen’s Bank. This team is committed to achieving exceptional prospect-to-customer conversion rates by providing digital insights to financial product & service business owners.