Credit Union SEO Case Study — Metro Credit Union 2009

The Challenge

When we were hired by Metro Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in Massachusetts, in April 2009, they had some initial, local ranks. These mostly included town names for an old domain name, metrocreditunion.org. They ranked #7 for “credit unions ma” in Google, etc. and had a few 3rd and 4th page ranks for their newer domain, metrocu.org. These included things like “wireless banking massachusetts” at #30 in Google.

Google was clearly unsure of which domain was the correct one, and this needed to be remedied. They were also looking to increase visibility for state and regional search terms, as well as add ranks for higher-level terms like “online banking”.

The Credit Union Marketing Strategy

We advised the client that they needed to immediately implement an “IP Funnel” technique that would redirect users from the old domain to the new one.

Although the old domain had more backlinks, the IP Funnel would “channel” the link power to the new domain and would tell Google to un-index the old site and index the new one.

Metro Credit Union was aware that some first-page ranks on the old domain could be lost temporarily while we fixed the domain indexing issue. However, they opted to take a long-term approach and agreed to use metrocu.org as their main domain moving forward, as that was the domain they were using in their offline marketing efforts.

We installed Google Analytics on the site to complement their existing analytics package and started adjusting on-page optimization factors on the main pages, including Title tags, Meta tags, and text optimization.

Additionally, we started a link-building campaign that involved submitting press releases and articles to online media and content sites, with links back to the Metro Credit Union website.

The Results

Site Indexing

Before implementation of the IP Funnel, Google had indexed 227 pages on the metrocu.org domain and 106 pages on the old metrocreditunion.org domain. As of September 2009, Google had continued to index the full metrocu.org site, but was only indexing one page (the home page) on the metrocreditunion.org domain.

Indexed Pages

Search Engine Ranks

Out of 311 terms checked, Metro was ranking in the top 50 results for just 12 of those terms as of April 14, 2009 (including ranks on both domains). On August 5, 2009, Metro was ranking in the top 50 results for 135 terms, all on the correct metrocu.org domain.

Get more information about our bank and credit union marketing services.