Santander

Driving up Santander’s online visibility and sales through a successful SEO campaign

The Objectives

Following the merger of Alliance & Leicester with Santander, we sought to replicate the impressive page one rankings for the Santander.co.uk site.

The Strategy

Santander.co.uk was a relatively new domain without a strong base of relevant and powerful backlinks and Content Management Systems (CMSs) are notorious for creating challenges for SEO. To overcome this, we:

  • Created a layer of additional search engine optimised pages outside the restrictions of the CMS. These pages replicated the content of the site and were refreshed automatically, on a daily basis
  • Made extensive use of the ‘canonical tag’ (a tag specifically designed to compensate for duplicate content) to persuade search engines to recognise, within our new pages, the authority of the originals
  • Devised an SEO campaign focusing on the ten most competitive terms in the finance industry with relevance to A&L products
  • A&L wanted to see a rapid improvement in its search rankings in Google - but had significant restrictions on the degree of on-page changes that could be made to help improve those rankings; to tackle these issues, we devised an accelerated online PR programme

The Results

KEYWORD

NUMBER OF COMPETITIVE SITES

PRE-GREENLIGHT RANK

AT MONTH THREE

HIGHEST RANK

Loans

169,000,000

34

5

2

Personal loans

36,400,000

21

3

1

Unsecured loans

2,480,000

26

4

2

Car loans

17,800,000

69

1

1

Bank accounts

44,600,000

43

3

3

Current accounts

87,300,000

9

3

2

Mortgages

78,600,000

24

4

2

Mortgage calculator

8,170,000

31

4

4