An integrated SEO + Paid ad campaignto get 25k clicks & 10k unique visitors a day

SEO is a powerful tool for attracting leads over a long term, while paid advertising can deliver the much-needed clicks quickly. By syncing these two tools, we helped a trading platform go from 0 to 10,000 unique daily visitors, get 100k+ clicks, and rank in the top 10 for over 260 keywords.

Challenge: attracting traffic and leads to a brand-new site

Our client was an online trading platform based in Latin America that was looking to attract new users from very different GEOs (Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia etc.) and encourage them to open a demo trading account. 

The niche was very saturated, with an intense competition for traffic in the key regions. Our solution was radical: create several SEO-friendly partner sites from scratch, find quality drop domains for them, fill them with content (and add new content to the client’s main site), and launch paid ad campaigns to attract traffic. The two main parts of the project – SEO optimization and paid advertising – worked in perfect synergy. 

Part 1: SEO and content

Step 1: Drop domains

Drop domains are web domains that have been „dropped“ (abandoned) by their owners. Such domains can be purchased through special marketplaces, and they can rank surprisingly high on Google. 

For this campaign, we purchased several relevant drop domains with names related to the client’s trading products; this alone would give us extra SEO juice.

Step 2: new websites and internal optimization

We built a set of brand-new partner sites on WordPress, but with unique templates and on a separate IP address. We introduced new meta tag templates, including for the filter pages in each section, added breadcrumbs, and optimized the XML sitemap.

BDC’s SEO specialists also made sure to make the sites responsive and to optimize the page load speed, as this influences Google rankings.

Step 3: semantics and content

• Building a semantic core: a set of keywords and keyphrases that future articles would need to rank for. 
• Selecting keywords: we used the so-called KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio method) to find underutilized long-tail keyphrases method. 
• Achieving high rankings with minimum resources: the SEO Avalanche technique. 
• Regular expansion of the semantic core.
• Drawing up a Mind Map and a hierarchy of categories and subcategories for  future content.
• Creating a content plan and a first set of SEO-rich articles on financial and trading topics. 
• Adding at least 15 fresh articles every month to have as many pages with unique content as possible.
• Careful monitoring the search rankings of each article and adjusting them as needed.

Moreover, we promoted the author of the articles, too. We managed the author’s social media pages and published additional content signed by them, as well as created social media pages for the websites themselves. 

We also made sure to adjust the content to Google’s YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) and E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines, as websites about finance and trading are scrutinized closely by the algorithm.

Step 4: article promotion

We carefully analyzed the inbound link profiles of the client’s competitors and purchased links on similar websites to attract traffic to the articles. We also used crowd marketing (publishing links on niche forums) and added the sites to various directories. 

Results: content marketing and SEO

The efforts paid off: we achieved a strong PageRank and drew in a lot of traffic, especially for Brazil (10k visits), the most important region for our client. We also managed to get the articles rank in the top 3 for 83 keyphrases and in the top 10 for 264 keywords.

We've achieved good traffic and ranking results for India, Mexico, and Indonesia, with articles ranking in the top 10 for up to 139 queries. 

Part 2: paid advertising campaign

The strategy

Once a big body of new content was live, we launched an advertising campaign using banner ads and social media advertising. Brazil, Portugal, and Mexico were selected as the target GEOs. 

We didn't just aim to initiate as many clicks as possible, but also to improve traffic quality to boost the conversions from registration to trading deposit.

We used the following tools to maximize campaign efficacy:

1. testing different combinations of banner visuals and texts;
2. targeting an audience that was similar to the existing website users;
3. testing new advertising goals 
4. constant optimization and monitoring to increase conversion rate. 

Results

In just 4 months, we achieved impressive results:

• 107,509 website visits;
• 5,703 banner clicks;
• 1,976 registrations;
• 1,199 demo accounts opened;
• For 3 months out of 4, the cost per click went down while the number of registrations and deposits went up;
• Every month we managed to raise the KPI by 14%. 

Insights and conclusions

• SEO can bring in a lot of leads over a long term, but it can't produce immediate results. By contrast, paid ads can attract some leads quickly, but a single campaign only yields results for a limited time. The winning recipe is the combination of SEO and paid advertising: it helps the site rank higher and boosts site visits immediately.
• In total, we received over 25k visits and 513 registrations on the new landing website created for the campaign (in addition to the clicks and registrations on the client’s main site).  As no other tools were used, this result is 100% thanks to the SEO + Paid synergy.
• Social media ads converted many more users than banners: after the campaign was scaled up, the campaign yielded 457 registrations in April at $1.51 per user; out of these, 293 users opened demo accounts ($2.36 per user). 
• The best-converting funnel of all was the Facebook ad campaign aimed at Brazil and Portugal and leading to the new landing site we created.

When using complex marketing strategies, it's important to invest enough time in research, planning, and competition analysis. This way you can make sure that each element of the strategy kicks in at the right moment and strengthens the other tools, rather than hinder them.