MONETA Money Bank: how we helped to build the SEO leader in the banking sector

MONETA Money Bank is the undisputed leader in SEO in the banking sector. In the vast majority of verticals, it dominates the Share of Voice metric (organic market share), which is one of the main SEO metric we monitor and report on a monthly basis.

Introduction

MONETA Money Bank has been our client since the first half of 2019. We built on the good work of the client’s previous agency, which helped them create a new SEO-friendly website in the third quarter of 2018.

Thanks to the website’s good technical background, we were able to fully focus, right from the beginning of our collaboration in 2019, on content work, linkbuilding, and eventually also on tuning “nice to have” opportunities, which we will look at more in the chapter on SEO strategy.

Our cooperation continues to this day, and we have achieved together many successes with the client! Such achievements are our joint second place in the 2020 SEO of the Year competition and first place in Internet Effectiveness Awards 2024 - both highly renowned competitions in the Czech Republic.

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Goals

We see the Moneta.cz website as a sales tool that must be displayed in organic search results to the widest possible group of users. Given the high competition in the paid section of the results, budgetary pressures, and the seasonality of campaigns, sustainably growing visibility in organic results is the path to stable growth in sales results.

With this complex goal in mind, we primarily focus on the following metrics:

• Organic Traffic
• Share of Voice
• Overall SEO Visibility

Conversions are not the primary goal, but they are also taken into account secondarily – we pay attention to the relevance of content in order to attract users with conversion potential to the website.

From the beginning of our collaboration, our ambitions and KPIs have been nothing but the highest:

1. Be number one in Share of Voice in every vertical.
2. Increase the already high organic traffic by approximately 43% to a seemingly unattainable level.

We managed to meet the KPI for organic traffic by January 2021. And what about the Share of Voice metric?

Performance in verticals varies depending on how the client's priorities have changed over time. However, the long-term priority is loans, where we took the lead in the third month after we started measuring Share of Voice, and we have maintained that position to date. Moreover, Share of Voice in this vertical has been growing steadily, and we are now at 80%!

What about other verticals? We will take a detailed look at this in the chapter Reporting, Measurement, and Evaluation.

SEO Strategy

The strategy was primarily focused on content and its support through link building activities. The priority sections we worked on on the website:

• product pages
• frequently asked questions
• glossary of terms
• blog
• financial calculators
• bank and insurance company codes
• commodities

Product pages

Priority number 1. The most important pages for business. Visibility on the most general, but also the most competitive product queries in the TOP3, ideally in the first position.

How did we achieve this and how do we keep our main products at the top?

• SEO modules – continuous optimized texts on product pages.
• High-quality supporting content and related perfect internal linking.
• Link building activities – continuous acquisition of links from relevant websites.
• Optimization of SERP results (titles and meta descriptions, but also, for example, structured FAQ and reviews data) for the purpose of optimizing CTR → the higher the CTR, the more relevant the search engine considers the result and the more likely it is to remain in the top position.

To cover the widest possible range of relevant keywords, we also work with subpages of main products – these are patterns such as "loan + amount", "conversion of x EUR to CZK", "travel insurance + country" and the like.

Frequently asked questions, glossary of terms, and blog

Three main content sections. Creation of supporting content with the aim of covering long-tail queries about the products and services of financial institutions, specific financial terms, and providing a deeper and more detailed explanation of financial situations. Emphasis on high-quality internal linking across the website.

Financial calculators

Calculators from leading financial websites incorporated into info articles on specific topics – 44 pages in total. Coverage of queries with lower business relevance but with huge search volumes. Thanks to its high visibility, this section serves to significantly raise the profile of the MONETA brand even outside of common banking topics and is one of the most important sources of organic traffic to the website (in 2021, it brought more than 7% of total organic traffic to the website).

Bank and insurance company codes

Section with landing pages for each bank and insurance company code. Coverage of a wide range of queries in TOP positions – in many cases in the form of a featured snippet, i.e. in the so-called zero position. Lower relevance, but again a significant branding effect and source of traffic.

Technical features

Featured snippets

• Focus on queries with the potential to gain featured snippets (bank codes) and optimization of existing landing pages in content sections in order to gain featured snippets.
• Effect: out of a total visibility of 43,000 keywords in CZ, 1,000 keywords are in the zero position. This represents more than 2% coverage in featured snippets. According to Ahrefs, the total monthly search volume for these keywords in Google is almost 300,000.

FAQ structured data

• An extension that significantly increases the appearance of search results in Google SERP. Using this structured data, it is possible to provide the necessary information to the user already in SERP, but it can also be used to attract more users to the website and thus optimize CTR.
• Moneta.cz was the first to implement this extension in the banking sector on its product pages. Competitors are also gradually beginning to add this extension.
• The implementation led to an increase in CTR and thus also to an increase in traffic to product pages.

Link building

An integral part of SEO activities is also continuous link building focused on relevant websites and quality magazines. Thanks to the strong reputation of the MONETA brand, there was considerable capital in the form of a large number of partnerships that could be used for link building. The main methods implemented since the beginning of the collaboration are:

• linking with partners within the bene+ program
• linking with brokers
• linking with other relevant financial entities
• continuous cooperation with leading Czech magazines

Thanks to extensive link building activities from the very beginning of the cooperation, we managed to achieve very good results on business-critical queries in a short period of time.

A one-time link building activity that contributed to this was reaching out to the most relevant historical websites that linked to Moneta.cz (or the original Gemoney.cz), but only to the homepage, which originally received almost 100% of backlinks. Thanks to appropriately chosen communication, several links, where it made sense thematically, were redirected to products, whose organic performance thus increased significantly in the first few months.

Reporting, measurement, evaluation

Share of Voice

To get an overall picture of how we are doing in organic search, we monitor not only the positions of several thousand keywords, but also the overall visibility in each of the topics using the Share of Voice metric.

For example, in the context of loans, we know which terms bring the client to the first page. At the same time, we know how popular the entire topic of loans is in terms of search volume. We compare these two pieces of data and determine the Share of Voice within each vertical for both our client and our competitors. Increasing this percentage leads directly to an increase in organic traffic.

If you want to learn more about the Share of Voice metric, including how to calculate it with CTR, read one of our previous articles.

So what does the situation look like in individual verticals in specific numbers?

Loans

We have already outlined the situation in loans at the beginning of the article.

Mortgages

Together with loans, this is one of the most important verticals. In addition to its business potential, this vertical also achieves high search volumes, meaning it has interesting SEO potential. And, as with loans, we have been the undisputed market leaders in this vertical since September 2019, with an SOV of around 80%.

Current accounts

A vertical focused on current bank accounts, student accounts, and, among other things, exchange rates. Due to the high volatility of queries regarding exchange rates, this vertical is unstable, but for queries purely related to current accounts, Moneta.cz ranks in the TOP 3.

Savings accounts

Keywords related to savings accounts and savings in general. Long-term market leaders with SOV between 70–90%.

Cards

A vertical focused on debit, payment, and credit cards and everything related to card payments, etc. Market leaders since February 2020, with minor fluctuations.

Mutual funds

A vertical that deals with investments – primarily mutual funds, but also other alternatives and investment concepts. In terms of banks, Moneta.cz is doing best, with only two financial magazines currently ahead of it. However, we managed to surpass even those in five months.

Building savings

Together with personal and corporate finance, this is the smallest vertical with less than 100 keywords. Thanks to this, the results of all websites in this vertical are very good, but Moneta.cz is again the leader with a current record Share of Voice of 93%.

Personal and corporate finance

This is primarily a content vertical covered by the content section, which is why our competitors in this vertical include not only banks but also financial magazines, primarily Kurzy.cz. And we managed to beat even that in November 2021, making us the leaders in this vertical as well.

What about other metrics?

Organic traffic

Organic traffic grew steadily, except for minor fluctuations (especially during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic), and we managed to meet the KPI in the form of a seemingly unattainable absolute value from the starting point. In January 2021, we even slightly exceeded the 43% increase needed to meet this KPI, thus fulfilling the KPI for organic traffic.

Overall SEO visibility

The Ahrefs metric for overall SEO visibility also shows a positive trend. We focused not only on increasing overall visibility by initiating and creating new relevant content sections, but also on increasing the share of keywords in the TOP10 and TOP3, which logically have the highest share of performance. The result is long-term growth in both overall visibility and keywords in the TOP10 and TOP3.

Conclusion

Our nearly seven-year collaboration with MONETA Money Bank continues, and we are pleased to be part of building the undisputed leader in the banking sector in organic search and to continue to help defend this position. Our dominance in organic search is confirmed by both Share of Voice data, where we are leaders in almost every vertical, and data on traffic and SEO visibility.