📈 Case Study: Deadline-driven, full-site content refresh for a financial services rebrand

About the business

  • Established UK financial services provider
  • Complete content refresh to go alongside new site launch

Nature of the work

Content writing
Content strategy
Competitor analysis

The challenge

An established financial services business had undergone a merger and was preparing to re-launch with a refreshed brand and new website. Significant investment had gone into the new brand identity, and the existing website hadn’t been updated for several years.

The existing content was unexciting, overly technical, and didn’t reflect the new branding at all. The knock-on effect of this poor content was very limited organic search performance. It needed a complete overhaul before a fixed go-live date to coincide with a new physical branch opening.

The brief needed to consider:

  • Content that needed updating to reflect the new brand’s tone and overall positioning
  • Content gaps were notable and these pages would need to be created and written ahead of launch
  • The brand redevelopment focussed mostly on visuals, with little guidance for written communications
  • The usual complexities around financial promotions and adhering to compliance
  • A push towards lowering the overall reading age of its content, to ensure the new site was more accessible

All of this had to land in time for a hard launch deadline.

The approach

I firstly established what currently existed, what was performing, what wasn’t, and proposed a plan for all existing content on the site. With only around 40 existing pages, these were easy to make a decision on:

Keep & update | Remove | Merge with another page

This benchmark would also help establish what new content would be required — from common sense, and experience in the financial services industry, long before any keyword research was undertaken to really solidify this.

It was fairly apparent that content needed updating on all pages, even those which were informational such as the contact page, which lacked personality. There were also duplicate pages serving very similar content to be rationalised. Key pages were thin, meaning very poor performance in organic search, and a poor experience for the customer.

Jargon would be removed from all pages, simplifying language across the site, and making financial terms understandable — all within the bounds of financial promotions compliance.

To give the site a solid SEO foundation from launch, meta content was provided for all pages, internal linking was considered, a clean URL structure provided, Google Business Profile optimisation undertaken, and some initial EEAT signals suggested. If the content went live as intended, the site should launch with some strong local relevance from day one.

The work

Across 40 existing and 20 new pages created from scratch, the work covered:

  • The all-important home page and key product offering category pages. These were rewritten to reflect the new brand voice and lead with clarity over complexity.
  • Important product pages. These were restructured to be more customer-facing, promoting the new branch, cutting technical language and focusing on positive customer outcomes. They were also fleshed out for better search performance.
  • Informational and compliance pages were given a light refresh.
  • Around 20 new pages built from scratch to plug content gaps ahead of launch, targeting both successful competitor content, as well as gaps in keyword targeting identified early in the build.
  • Meta titles, descriptions, and on-page SEO basics applied throughout to ensure the site had maximum visibility at launch.

Working closely with the in-house marketing department, content was created alongside the web development build, with key milestones tied to the design project.

Achievements

All content was delivered and live in time for the branch opening, making sure the relaunched website reflected the new brand from day one. Content was signed off, consistent in tone, accessible in language, and added to the site ready for launch.

For a business investing significantly in a brand transformation, having the website content ready and aligned at launch was the key objective. A polished visual identity carried over into on-brand web content designed to drive performance, at a time when the site was predicted to have its highest ever traffic at launch.

89% growth in keywords ranking 6 months after launch

Keyword research and content plan created to build on the initial site launch

Stronger messaging which would benefit all channels

Key takeaways

  • A relatively simple content refresh can add a lot of organic search value, if this is considered alongside other key objectives
  • Brand transformations only land if the written component matches the visual aspect
  • Lowering reading age can be an efficiency alongside any content refresh, benefitting all customers
  • Compliance and creativity needn’t be polar opposites
  • Fixed deadline can provide useful discipline — ensuring businesses that can otherwise slow down approval and publication ‘get stuff done’

Is your content in need of a refresh?

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