On-Page & Content SEO Program

Company

🏦 Santander

Skill Area

🌐 Organic and Paid Traffic

Tool Stack

SEMRushSurferSEOGoogle AnalyticsLighthouse API

📋

Overview

🔍 Context	Led the organic search traffic generation strategy for personal loans and revolving credit products across Netherlands and Belgium markets.
💬 Challenges	Low organic visibility, limitation on internal resources for content creation, tight RORWA requirements which were difficult to achieve in short-term with SEO (in comparison with PPC)
🚀 Objectives	Drive significant growth in organic traffic, offset PPC costs in part, improve technical SEO metrics, bring testing mindset to content team, demonstrate ROI growth from content creation with full funnel impact

👨‍💻

Strategy: Directed the internal marketing team on SEO focus points, establishing clear workflows and accountability structures to ensure seamless implementation of SEO initiatives (reporting to head of Digital).
Technical SEO: Developed comprehensive technical requirements for external CMS developer Poort80, ensuring website infrastructure adhered to best practices and supported strategic SEO goals.
Data and analytics: Established measurement frameworks and analytics protocols to track, evaluate, and optimize SEO initiatives with ROI metrics.
Regular audits: Implemented regular audits using Screaming Frog and SEMRush to identify technical issues like broken links, monitor content performance, and track competitor SERP positions and updated Asana roadmaps based on results
Cross-functional collaboration: Facilitated alignment between marketing, development, content, and analytics teams to ensure cohesive execution of SEO strategy.
Budget management: Advocated for resource allocation across various SEO initiatives, prioritizing investments based on projected impact and strategic importance.
SEO tool administration: Set up and managed technical SEO tooling infrastructure to support ongoing monitoring and optimization efforts, e.g. SurferSEO, Screaming Frog, etc.

⚙️

Implemented rigorous A/B testing methodology that validated SEO hypotheses vis-a-vis meta descriptions and titles , resulting in 35% higher CTR for winning variants
Tested addition of new schema markup, such as questions/answers and ratings
Performed A/B tests on landing page content as before/after tests to evaluate SEO uplift and use data for SEO business cases

Created a landing page with dynamic amounts such that any amount could be injected in the URL to adjust the page dynamically in following URL under [xxx] placeholder:

and indexed specific pages that were relevant based on search demand identified from SEMRush keyword research data

Wrote user stories and business requirements for developers: conveying requirements to the development team and UAT, for the landing pages as well as the continuation of the flow to calculator to application form pages according to the dynamic amount
Managed the sitemap and indexing: Managed the entries for the sitemap.xml

RESULTS

Time saving of internal resources in creation of 15-20 high value landing page creation
Achieved top 3 rankings for 7 of the target keywords
Additional SEO traffic that resulted in booked loan amount turnover between 3-4 million EUR per month

Site Speed Optimization: Worked on reducing page load times by identifying optimizations and writing requirements for image compression, caching optimizations, significantly improving SEO
Core web vitals: Identified opportunities and implemented
XML Sitemap and Robots.txt Management: Regularly updated the XML sitemap and robots.txt to prioritize critical pages for indexing while excluding low-priority or redundant content.
URL Structure Optimization: Refined URL structures to be shorter, more descriptive, and keyword-rich, making them more SEO-friendly and readable for users.
404 and Redirect Management: Regularly checked for broken links, implemented 301 redirects for obsolete pages, and optimized the 404 page to retain users and direct them to relevant sections of the site.

Established ROI-focused content calendar based on comprehensive keyword gap and seasonality analysis together with marketing / content team
Prioritized content creation based on competition level, conversion potential, and alignment with business objectives
Regularly evaluated performance, with full funnel data reporting and presented impact/results across the teams

📊

Increase of 140% of organic traffic in a span of 3 months post the on-site SEO overhaul
Boosted technical SEO metrics (LCP, CLS, INP) to a strong grade from ‘poor’
Achieved / maintained top 5 rankings for over 100+ keywords, the combined search volume of which ranged 30,000 - 50,000 monthly

On this page