Aspiration Case Study

How Aspiration increased traffic 237% during the engagement by building a huge content hub around what their customers (and potential customers) cared about most

Summary

Aspiration, an environment-focused neobank, came to us during an period of rapid growth.
Their primary brand was gaining market share rapidly, and they wanted to expand their visibility with audience in both environmentally responsible and financially responsible spaces.

To do that, they created an offshoot project: Make Change (a project still connected to their main brand and housed on their primary website) to get in front of more potential customers.

Ranq was able to develop a strong content strategy that grew traffic by 237% during the engagement, adding an additional ~7,000 monthly organic visits and an additional ~$10,000 in monthly traffic value.

Goals

Gain additional visibility in conversations about the environment, climate change, personal finance, ethical banking and ethical credit cards.

Let’s work together

CHALLENGES

Challenge #1: Building relevance in two disparate areas on one website

Building relevance in one area can be straightforward. Building relevance in two areas (environmentalism and personal finance, in this case) is difficult, requiring lots of extra effort (and a lot more time) to show Google you’re an authority in both, and that those areas are connected.

Challenge #2: Strict rules for branding and messaging

Aspiration cannot technically call itself a bank (yet). We had to work with (and around) complex legalities to target the audiences we wanted to target inside the strict parameters in which they operate.

Challenge #3: No technical SEO foundation, strategy or direction

Aspiration’s marketing team (for this project) was small and lacked SEO expertise, requiring us to build the technical strategy from scratch.

Strategy

1. Content strategy focusing on building dual-relevance

The project had already established a small amount of relevance in the environmentalism space, but the content was too far disconnected from finance. Ranq’s content strategy refocused environment-focused content and aggressively built related relevance in personal finance.

2. Rebuilding the technical foundation

The technical foundation of this project was untidy, and several key errors were holding traffic back. Ranq removed those obstacles and rebuilt a clean technical foundation.

3. Aggressive publishing

To build relevance, you need a big book of content. To build that book of content, Ranq published as aggressively as budgets would allow.

4. Measuring & building on traction in relevance

As we saw pockets of relevance gaining traction, we leaned into those trends to build even more momentum (and visibility) in those spaces.

5. Complementary, high-impact link building efforts

The link building required for this project was outside the scope of Ranq’s usual capabilities, so we brought on our sister agency (who only builds links and does nothing else) to complement our technical SEO and content campaigns.

6. Using branded traffic

As Aspiration’s brand grew, we targeted branded content in the areas relevant to Make Change.