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TransferWise reaches organic search traffic of over 1,000,000 visits
"If you ask an agency to deliver 10x organic search growth through content, they will assign a large team to your project and charge a considerable amount for junior talent. Our content team, in contrast, can run activities with SEMrush without having an army of people specialized in SEO."
About TransferWise:
TransferWise is a financial company for people that travel, live and work internationally. It is a peer-to-peer money transfer service launched in 2011 with headquarters in London and offices in a number of cities including Tallinn, New York and Singapore. They make sending money overseas up to 8 times cheaper than the bank, and its Borderless account allows customers to manage money in 29 different currencies. TransferWise supports more than 750 currency routes across the world as well as providing multi-currency accounts.
Business challenge
Moving money between countries as cheaply as possible comes at a price, and TransferWise know this only too well. Over the past 3.5 years they have launched majority of the markets globally. Their success comes from cutting the costs to nearly one-eighth of the banks’ costs and making money transfers transparent and convenient.
“Our mission is to eventually make money transfer free,” states Fabrizio Ballarini, who is responsible for SEO at TransferWise. “Traditional marketing activities like above-the-line advertising and TV ads are expensive and hard to track.” TransferWise in fact have unlimited marketing budgets but are restricted by payback constraints, meaning that each campaign is expected to return a margin on the spend within a certain time frame to ensure the company is profitable. “In order for TransferWise to get closer to being free, our acquisition costs must become lower and lower. We can’t afford to pay 100£ to acquire a customer that will benefit from close to free service.”
Until a few years ago there was no SEO team, not a single product, landing page or article acquiring non-brand organic traffic. There was no keyword data and their marketing team was delivering roughly 5-10 articles per month in one language. This was far from satisfactory for their growing business and the ambitions they had, along with a pressing need for customers to pay less and less.
Undoubtedly, anything that could grow the company sustainably was the main challenge. The need to maintain a high level of organic growth if they wanted to achieve their mission meant TransferWise had to seek a solution that could support the entire business process.
Solution
Two years ago, TransferWise turned to the SEMrush Historic Index to gain an understanding of what could get them organic traffic, and competitive research proved instrumental in identifying what could attract their target customers.
In addition to content development, Fabrizio talks about using the tool to understand if online products could be built. “Say there is search volume around products that customers use when transferring money. Our engineers look at it and see what product could be built. That scales even better than content!”
Their content team, with the support of only one SEO specialist, uses the Keyword Magic Tool and Content Template to define the best topics and article structures and they create Content Briefs. The copywriting team can then turn it into actual pieces of useful information.
“Our content strategy is fairly simple. If we create helpful content for our customers, by the time they need to send money, they will surely consider us,” says Fabrizio. “Imagine you are buying a property in Spain and you need to move 200k from the UK to buy it; or maybe you are just a student paying your loan back in the UK from Germany. Your first problem would be to figure out how to pay the loan rather than worry about money transfer,” continues Fabrizio. “So, the goal is always to make the best possible article for customers interested in a given topic.”
As a result, the amount of content produced has grown 4-5 times in less than a year, amounting to nearly 200-300 articles in 5-6 languages per quarter. The overall blog traffic has demonstrated a tenfold increase.
Fabrizio also highlights how using SEMrush has optimized their expenses when it comes to producing cost-effective content. “If you ask an agency to deliver 10x organic search growth through content, they will assign a large team to your project and charge a considerable amount for junior talent. Our content team, in contrast, can run activities with SEMrush without having an army of people specialised in SEO. SEMrush helps us with research while our content specialists focus on producing high quality content.”
Extra value also comes from the use of SEMrush by TransferWise’s Affiliate team. Fabrizio describes how it works: “We have partnerships with various websites, and say there is one performing particularly well and driving good prospects to our website. If we come across another website that ranks well in the same set of keywords then we may come to the conclusion that it is also good for us and see if a partnership can be established.”. By analyzing the search landscape combined with the use of Semrush Traffic Analytics, TransferWise was able to build a solid pipeline of potential partners.
Results
- TransferWise reaches organic search traffic of over 1,000,000 less than 24 months while scaling acquisition costs, thanks to SEMrush insights.
- Heavy advertising campaigns would inevitably lead TransferWise to increase the average transaction price and that would undermine the whole model of an almost free money transfer. Organic traffic became instrumental for their business needs and SEMrush suite enabled such tremendous growth.
- Content database grows 10x in several months, reaching nearly 300 articles per quarter, resulting in a 1000% organic traffic boost.
- TransferWise went from having a lack of content to being prolific content providers with a 10x increased traffic over the course of 12 months. SEMrush helps TransferWise discover data that the writers use to produce effective content.
- Partnership prospecting and development facilitated.
- Expanding business means using your own resources as well as attracting partners. To monitor and identify the most suitable partner prospects TransferWise relied on SEMrush and has strengthened their partner network.
