How a global SEO overhaul recaptured lost traffic, driving 80%+ revenue growth for a financial services leader

Client introduction

The client is the go-to destination for millions of Americans seeking clarity on personal finance, standing as the market leader for credit card and personal finance comparisons in the United States. Their reputation is built on providing comprehensive, trusted advice that empowers consumers, and has recently begun an international expansion into other English-speaking countries.

Problem

The company’s international expansion was hitting a wall. Despite having dedicated websites for Canada and Australia, Google consistently served US-based pages to users in those regions—a classic case of international traffic cannibalisation. This created a jarring user experience, presenting customers with information and products that were often irrelevant or unavailable in their country. The business couldn’t effectively monetise this traffic with local advertising, and the growth of its Canadian and Australian operations was stagnating.

The crux of the issue was the lack of hreflang tag support on these pages. Hreflang is the tagging system that allows webmasters to specify the language and region targeting of a given page, and identify their equivalents for other regions. Implementing these tags would be critical for success.

A legacy hreflang tag system was already in place for the UK market, but it was a sticking plaster solution and incapable of scaling to handle four distinct regions. The core challenge was a technical one. Each local website was served from a separate Content Management System (CMS) instance, making a unified, cross-platform solution seem like a pipe dream. Without a fix, the company’s global ambitions were dead in the water.

Solution

Into this complex digital environment stepped Seb Atkinson, who acted as the SEO lead within a multinational engineering team. The solution was tactical, strategic, and deeply analytical.

First, Seb developed an impact analysis to get a real handle on the problem. This wasn’t just a simple traffic audit: he built a python script to calculate the lost traffic and revenue resulting from the incorrectly routed users. This gave the project a clear, data-backed business case. To solve the content puzzle, he identified all overlapping articles and produced a content matrix—a clear map for grouping international pages together.

This analysis uncovered a wealth of new content opportunities. Using search data from non-US traffic, Seb identified local demand for topics not yet covered outside the American market. He then ran an energising workshop with the international content teams, educating them on international SEO best practices and unveiling the new opportunities.

With the strategy defined, the technical architecture came next. Seb defined the engineering objectives and acceptance criteria for a new hreflang tag system. He then took the lead in identifying and assembling a cross-functional team of developers, with representatives for each of the disparate CMS platforms. Working hand-in-glove with this team, he helped refine the technical approach, ensuring it was robust enough to work across every system without disrupting other essential processes.

The outcome of this collaboration was transformative: a brand new, centralised hreflang dashboard. This tool could deploy and synchronise hreflang tags automatically across all four platforms—a single source of truth for the company’s entire international footprint.

Results

The results were swift and substantial. Over a three-month period, organic traffic to the previously cannibalised Canadian and Australian pages shot up by 81% and 82% respectively. Not only did the correct region-specific pages displace their US counterparts in local search results, this traffic increase was primarily achieved by a 2-4 ranking position improvement. Furthermore, this wasn’t just vanity traffic: revenue from these markets scaled proportionately. That’s because the previous US pages were unable to convert traffic into customers outside of the US, while the regional versions were.

There were also powerful bonus outcomes. The local content teams, once working in the dark when it came to knowing what content to regionalise for their markets, now had a clear picture of how to optimise their work for their specific audiences using hreflang tags to their full potential. They were provided with data on existing content that already achieved a baseline level of performance, helping them identify low hanging fruit and scale up international reach quickly and effectively.

Furthermore, Seb’s impact analysis script was integrated into the company’s monthly Technical SEO reporting. It now functions as an ongoing maintenance and opportunity-spotting tool, flagging new content possibilities and identifying when page clusters need updating.

Conclusion

This project was far more than a technical fix. It was a strategic intervention that solved a foundational problem hindering the client’s global growth. By combining deep technical SEO knowledge with collaborative leadership and data-driven strategy, Seb was able to resolve a frustrating digital knot for the business. The solution delivered not only immediate, dramatic gains in traffic and revenue but also provided the client with the tools and knowledge to sustain and build upon that success for years to come.