Argentina’s leading financial service provider grows online sales from 0% to 70% and wins top 3 positions on Google within 1 year

Business Challenge: dominate on SERP for competitive non-branded keywords, introduce a new brand name and kick off online customer acquisition

In 2017, Naranja refreshed their identity under a campaign called Naranja Re_Nueva, which included dropping the word “Tarjeta” (“card” in Spanish) from their name, as they stopped being merely a credit card issuer. The company is now simply Naranja (“orange” in Spanish, like both the fruit and the color), a new identity that helps better reflect the diverse products and services they offer through their omni-channels.

At the same time, the company set out to develop new digital financial solutions for their customers and merchants, like online credit card applications, bill payments, and other services that were previously only available in person at their 202 branches in Argentina.

To support their major digital transformation with a strong online presence, Naranja started an in-house digital marketing team and brought Ellie Ferrari, an SEO specialist, on board. Naranja had never implemented an SEO strategy for their site until that point.

Even though the brand keyword “Tarjeta Naranja” had a strong presence in organic searches and trends in Argentina, the new brand keyword “Naranja”, which now identified the company, didn’t. In 2017, the search term led to either the fruit or the orange color, and it was one of the principal goals of the new SEO specialist to secure it for the company.

Another major goal was dominating in the core non-branded organic searches like “tarjeta de crédito” (credit card). The competition tightened as new fintechs started to appear in Argentina and take up the first page of Google while Naranja, the largest credit card issuer in the country, wasn’t there.

The company was determined to kick off their online sales with strong organic and paid performance.

Solution: SEO audit, comprehensive keyword research, technical update, data-based content strategy

1. The first step was to assess the domain's health with the SEMrush Site Audit, list all technical updates required, and outline a six-month technical SEO strategy as the site had a number of technical problems. These included:

Duplicate meta descriptions

Duplicate title tags

Invalid structured data items

Slow load speed

Broken internal links

Missing / broken canonical links

Broken internal JavaScript and CSS files

 

The site’s Domain Health score was 19; after fixing the most essential technical issues it grew to 47. It took Naranja 3 months to see the impact of this transformation: their organic positions improved.

2. Next, Ellie Ferrari, Naranja’s SEO specialist, conducted comprehensive keyword research with SEMrush keyword analytics and started monitoring branded and non-branded keywords with SEMrush Position Tracking.

“Our company’s board of directors was curious to know why Naranja didn't appear for the search ‘credit card’ in Argentina. That was the first step we took. After that, we determined the ‘credit card’ keyword family, started monitoring it, improving content and reporting results,” explains Ellie.

“One interesting discovery was that although in all our websites we had ‘tarjeta Naranja’ mentioned many times, the keyword ‘tarjeta de crédito’ wasn't mentioned even once. The same happened with other products and services,” shares Ellie. “Once we started to improve the content and mention the keyword ‘tarjeta de crédito’ and other non-branded competitive keywords, our visibility started to improve.”

Naranja appeared on the first search results page of Google in April 2018 and reached the first position for “tarjeta de crédito” in Argentina in July 2018. Since then, the company has incorporated more products and services and has a steady presence in organic branded and non-branded searches in Argentina.

3. After that, they developed an SEO content strategy for Naranja.com, prioritizing their keyword universe.

To kick off content strategy, Naranja created separate product pages for every product, with a detailed description of its benefits and ways of acquiring it, added CTAs to the pages, and improved the structure of the pages by making them more user friendly, and the content more "user intent" oriented. They continued by enriching content for their help center, and answering all the questions their customers and prospects asked. Even though Naranja serves 5 million customers, there has never been an FAQ section on their website before, and all the queries were resolved either via call center or via social media channels such as Facebook or Twitter.

To overcome the fruit and color SERP position of the search term “Naranja”, Ellie started with content, adding Naranja (instead of tarjeta Naranja) to meta titles and meta descriptions. The definitive move that got Naranja.com on the first place of the SERP in Argentina was alt image content. There were 3800 images on their website without alternative text, and Ellie wrote it for them. Most of the images were from their products (credit cards, money loans, insurance, etc.) so it made sense to add the brand for the image, when suitable. That got them to the first position and also gave the company a good presence in image searches.

Today, Naranja performs keyword analysis on a regular basis to understand what people are searching for, how their customers and prospects refer to new financial products and services and leverage this information to build a more efficient content strategy.

They also regularly use SEMrush’s Backlink Audit tool to identify and eliminate toxic links and On-page SEO Checker to get ranking improvement recommendations for the pages of the Naranja.com website, such as on-page SEO ideas, semantically related words to include on pages, target content length and readability, and backlink prospects.

Results

Naranja now owns 125 keywords related to financial services in top 3 positions on Google in Argentina (September 2020);

70% of the Naranja’s total sales are now online (compared to 0% in 2017);

The main keyword family “tarjeta de credito” has remained in the top 3 positions since July 2018;

Naranja is a top competitor among major financial players in Argentina and it also now shows in organic searches.

A well-thought-out SEO and SEM strategy brought Naranja 30% of their clicks from organic search, great CTR, and excellent SERP positions (most keywords are placed on the first and second page of Google).