If you’re curious about Bankrate’s SEO success story, you’re in the right place. 

I’ll show you the strategy Bankrate used to become one of the most-trusted sources of financial advice for millions of people in the US, Canada, UK, and other parts of the world. But first, let’s take a trip down memory lane. 

Red Ventures acquired Bankrate for $1.24 billion in July 2017. 

Before then, Bankrate had spent 41 years establishing a solid reputation for publishing expert personal finance advice, with its first site going live in October 1996.

From 1996 until the acquisition, the website drove 8.4 million organic sessions every month, with a whopping $30.6 million in traffic value. That means lower marketing and customer acquisition costs, more prospects and revenue growth opportunities, and increased visibility, domain authority, and organic search rankings.

Fast forward five years after the sale, the results have been nothing short of impressive. Bankrate is now ranked among the top ten finance websites in the United States, with an organic search traffic value that has more than doubled.

(Did I mention that paid ads only drive 1.3% of Bankrate’s traffic? 🤯)

How did the consumer financial services company move from print publishing to building an SEO moat that generates millions in traffic and paved the way for a billion-dollar acquisition? Let’s find out.  

The Strategy Bankrate Used to Build an SEO Moat Worth $76.3M

Bankrate’s SEO strategy is pretty straightforward. The team used Google’s E-E-A-T to dominate the SERPs, build a backlink empire, and gain the trust of millions of people.

Let’s see how Bankrate used each strategy to its advantage and how you can use each oneto build a solid, revenue-generating online presence for your SaaS product. 

Using Google’s E-E-A-T 

Google’s ultimate goal is to create content its users find helpful. 

People who trust the search engine to provide them with accurate, helpful info are more likely to keep using it. So, prioritizing helpful content helps Google to maintain its 20-year dominance and reputation as a reliable and authoritative source of truth. 

That’s the same reason Google rolled out the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) quality-rater guidelines—so companies can self-evaluate before publishing to see if their content will be useful to the reader. Websites with high levels of E-E-A-T are more likely to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs), while those that lack E-E-A-T may struggle to rank at all.

Before we dive into breaking down how Bankrate shows each letter in the acronym, here’s an open secret you should know.

Creating content in topic clusters is one way to demonstrate a high level of E-E-A-T. 

SEO Topic clusters organize your site’s content around a specific topic or set of related topics. It lets you show users and search engines that you have a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. And when you provide high-quality, helpful information, you can increase your website’s authority and trustworthiness.

Bankrate, like NerdWallet, created a cluster of related, optimized content around topics that its audience was searching for. The site covers a wide range of financial topics, including credit, credit cards, real estate, and more.