No one wants web optimization like NerdWallet.
Their S-1 exhibits over 70% of visitors is unpaid. For a enterprise that transforms knowledge-seeking into revenue, that’s an ideal technique.
However it’s additionally imperfect. As a public firm, NerdWallet should brazenly admit when its web optimization fails. Worse nonetheless, dips in natural visitors can set off falling inventory costs and potential job losses. Decrease natural can set off falling inventory costs, which may result in job losses. And when Google tweaks its algorithms, it sends ripples by way of NerdWallet’s total ecosystem—from workers to stockholders.
Are you able to identify one other firm with extra pores and skin within the web optimization recreation?
NerdWallet’s journey affords a masterclass in web optimization technique and adaptation. Their web optimization success story is spectacular, to say the least, however they’re strolling a tightrope the place missteps aren’t an choice. That is exactly why there’ll at all times be a lot to be taught from NerdWallet.
Listed below are some issues I discovered from spending an excessive amount of time in Numberland with NerdWallet.
In response to our knowledge, NerdWallet misplaced an estimated 6M in natural visitors in three months. That’s a 23.6% loss in a really brief interval.
This loss was brought on by “surprising headwinds”, as their CEO put it within the 2024 Q2 financial report. And it appears to be like just like the loss in visitors resulted in a major loss in income and inventory worth.
Right here’s what the visitors appeared like earlier than the beginning of Q3 2024.
And that is how the inventory worth chart appeared after they instructed everybody how the visitors appeared.
Curiously, it occurred across the identical time because the latest March core update. The replace was stated to “repair” what you see on Google’s search outcomes by 40% by actually punishing websites that attempted to make the most of Google.
Was it the replace that hit NerdWallet so badly?
Julien Brault speculates it may need been due to Google’s new wealthy end result sort.
As Search Engine Round Table reports, Beginning June 2024, Google could present bank cards proper contained in the SERPs. This implies much less visitors for everybody who needs to rank for “finest bank cards”, together with NerdWallet.
However the visitors droop began earlier than that. By June 1st, it was truly all over.
I believe there have been a number of causes for this droop in visitors. One in every of them was search demand seasonality for a few of their “fattest” key phrases. Right here’s an instance.
This explains why their yearly visitors dips across the identical time. However discover how they bounce again stronger after every drop.
Different causes:
- They dropped a couple of spots to direct opponents. That is par for the course in web optimization.
- They noticed a couple of massive drops, outranked by a unique breed of websites. It appeared as if Google had changed the previous items with new ones.
I’ll go deeper into the reason for the loss in a bit.
If NerdWallet misplaced all that visitors, another person should have gained it, proper? I used to be curious, who deserved that visitors greater than NerdWallet?
I discovered three sorts of winners:
- Competing websites with comparable sources of income.
- Topically-specialized websites.
- Their companions.
I checked key phrases the place NerdWallet misplaced no less than 5k visits every or dropped by tens of rating positions. I discovered three sorts of winners.
Kind 1 winners. Competing websites with comparable enterprise fashions or no less than comparable sources of income (e.g., Bankrate, Forbes). Examples: “excessive yield financial savings account” and “finest on-line financial institution”.
That is enterprise as normal. NerdWallet loses a variety of visitors from small rating drops as a result of a competitor obtained extra hyperlinks or tweaked their content material. The outlook continues to be good for NerdWallet — they will do the identical to compete again.
This variation may even profit the typical Google person if the brand new top-ranking content material affords extra worth.
Kind 2 winners. Extra topically specialised websites. NerdWallet doesn’t simply write about bank cards. In addition they write about matters unrelated to their core enterprise mannequin. Examples: “rv rental” and “do you want a passport to go to puerto rico”.
These specialised websites can simply discover related calls to motion or readers. NerdWallet, in distinction, may battle to attach their choices.
I believe we’ll doubtless see extra of this shift in search outcomes. Google talks about giving an opportunity to “small, independent sites”, which is able to doubtless be narrowly specialised websites.
For NerdWallet, writing about matters like “rv rental” could be a poor guess for natural visitors on this local weather. Readers may nonetheless discover and belief this content material by way of different channels, given the robust model in finance. Nevertheless, the outlook for rating restoration or future competitors in these areas appears to be like poor.
Whether or not this advantages shoppers is debatable. Personally, I’d desire NerdWallet’s companion affords for journey over somebody’s area of interest journey tales about journeys I’d by no means take.
Kind 3 winners. Huge manufacturers providing the merchandise that NerdWallet writes about; principally monetary suppliers. And that features their partners like Chase or Wells Fargo.
I’ve seen many such circumstances. Along with sort 2, these key phrases fell in rankings the most.
I additionally checked out a number of the rating historical past charts and I believe I do know which “headwinds” rocked the boat. For example, take a look at the chart under — good, regular drifting, after which it hits.
It might be argued that it’s truthful for, say, Chase to outrank NerdWallet for branded queries. However what if the outranking content material is a comparability of the financial institution’s bank card and the content material that loses is a market-wide comparability of bank cards? Which is best for the buyer?
So, since NerdWallet can’t actually afford to be on this scenario for too lengthy, what measures did they take to get the visitors again up?
I checked the highest 20 pages that misplaced over 50k in visitors between the tip of February and June. Each single one had been up to date, with most present process main revisions or full overhauls.
In 8 out of 20 circumstances, it labored.
Past typical ways like tweaking titles and increasing subject protection, they employed two notable methods that doubtless helped regain some misplaced visitors.
The primary key tactic was strengthening their E-E-A-T signals. Specifically, they added explanations about their content creation process and why readers should trust their expertise.
In the graph below, you can see the moment of the big update (dark green circle) and the lift in traffic that came after.
Second tactic. When tweaking content failed, they relocated pages to a new directory. This move appears to give the content a “fresh start” while retaining the link equity from its original location.
I questioned: if NerdWallet is dropping rankings to the services they overview, does this imply they’re truly dropping visitors to their very own companions?
I checked a pattern of 9 companions providing bank cards. There are over 144K key phrases the place NerdWallet ranks within the high 10, and no less than a kind of companions ranks as nicely, usually outranking the fintech firm.
It appears to be like like a wise approach to diversify visitors sources for the companions.
From NerdWallet’s perspective, if deliberate, it might be an intriguing partnership proposition: “Associate with us as a result of we are able to outrank you, however you received’t lose if we do.”
Nevertheless, this places vital strain on NerdWallet, particularly since a few of these key phrases are branded. They need to preserve top-tier web optimization efficiency whereas hoping Google doesn’t resolve they’re “too good at web optimization”.
There’s additionally the chance that Google may shorten the trail from search to product, favoring product creators over reviewers. NerdWallet has already misplaced some visitors to their companions this manner. For those who take a look at the shift within the share of voice, it’s clear that NerdWallet lost some of it to the banks. In the past, it was the other way around.
You may assume that’s dangerous, however it’s truly fairly regular. It’s the Pareto precept in motion.
NerdWallet’s opponents present comparable or much more excessive visitors distributions. Even at Ahrefs, we observe the identical sample.
Amongst NerdWallet’s high 1.2% of traffic-driving content material, a shocking frontrunner emerges: a weblog submit about being profitable outperforms all different pages, together with their monetary product comparisons.
It generates extra visitors than the nifty price of residing calculator with all of its static pages listed.
NerdWallet virtually doesn’t want to the touch that weblog submit. They’ve achieved one content material overhaul and two main adjustments since 2021.
It simply sits there and retains the door open for searchers. That’s an epic win and and supreme case of the worth of web optimization – free, passive, constant visitors. Might this be the GOAT weblog submit?
There are extra weblog posts on that checklist; about 65% of all pages. The remainder of the visitors comes from on-line instruments such because the auto mortgage calculator and product critiques, like the very best bank cards.
And nearly 1 / 4 of them had been created this yr. This occurs even to the execs.
It might sound counterintuitive, however these pages will at all times be the very last thing they need to fear about. Specializing in bettering their greatest visitors mills — if there’s nonetheless room for progress — will doubtless yield higher general outcomes. Energy regulation distribution works in web optimization, too.
Right here’s an fascinating thought for content material localization — purchase the content material that already works nicely.
In 2020, NerdWallet acquired Know Your Cash. Together with the corporate, they acquired a longtime area on the UK market with all of its backlinks, traffic-generating content material, and final however not least, a counterpart of their bank card comparability instrument.
And it labored. On the chart you may see the second the place area grew to become nerdwallet.com/uk and an increase in visitors that adopted. The visitors is now 40X in PPC cash.
Three years after the acquisition they pruned half the pages, and visitors went up. Whereas counterintuitive, deleting poorly performing pages or “sacrificing” them to present one other web page a hyperlink fairness enhance usually works. 
Yearly, 1.6k to 3k pages fall from the highest 100.
I requested AI to write down a little bit script that checks if the ultimate URL was totally different from the unique to catch all sorts of redirects. I discovered that from the 2343 pages they misplaced between 10 Jun and 13 July 2023, round 75% had been redirects — one other case of content pruning.
With this type of pruning (redirects), sometimes you can see results shortly after. For example, in 2023, the results came immediately (1). The next time they had the same number of pages as before the cut, their traffic was up by 4 million (2).
If you’re doing SEO for a site like NerdWallet, you need to know your redirects inside and out. That’s how they split 14k blog posts with 7M traffic into different topic clusters. One of the AIs drew me this fantastic visualization of how they split it. Redirects at NerdWallet deserves its own article.
For those who’re not acquainted with programmatic SEO, it is a method of automatically generating large volumes of content at scale.
Diminishing returns is a common phenomenon in content marketing. It’s when the incremental benefits of creating and publishing new content decrease over time despite the same or increased effort and resources being invested.
Here’s how diminishing returns in programmatic SEO look on a chart. Page count (blue line) goes dramatically up with no effect on the traffic (orange line).
Programmatic SEO is a smart tactic but also flawed by design. It treats keywords with the same structure in the same way. But in reality, each keyword will have a different difficulty. And with that typically comes someone’s effort in content and links that you’d need to beat.
We observed this with one of our attempts at templated content. It worked for low-difficulty keywords (see chart below), but for other keywords, we needed to develop unique content.
Keywords you’d be trying to target this way may even have different intent. For instance, “phoenix vs new york” has the cost of living as the primary intent, while a general city comparison is last. NerdWallet ranks #1.
Conversely, “portland vs austin” is dominated by city comparison pages, and the cost of living is last. NerdWallet ranks #7 with the same programmatic tactic that gave it the top spot before.
Over 100 authors hyperlink to NerdWallet from no less than 30 totally different domains every. The highest contributor hyperlinks to NerdWallet from a formidable 303 distinctive domains.
Shocked? I was.
When you have these sorts of numbers in your website, it most likely signifies that somebody is working very laborious at scraping your content material.
However should you’re utilizing a PR company to syndicate your content material — like NerdWallet — you may test which content material goes the place and whether or not the canonical tag is in place.
Ultimate ideas
Opponents, companions making bolder strikes, and Google which typically occurs to assist them… though the interval examined on this article could not appear too vivid for the corporate, NerdWallet earned over $150 million in Q2 2024. In the whole 2023, they made $599.4 million. All with the assistance of web optimization.
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