Case Study · Banking / financial services (credit union)
Ent Credit Union: From Branded-Only Traffic to 10x Non-Branded Growth
10x non-branded organic click growth in year one (Jan 2021 to Jan 2022)
Ent Credit Union, a Colorado credit union at ent.com, had strong branded search but almost no visibility for the financial questions its members actually ask Google. In January 2021, non-branded queries were a rounding error next to branded demand. Over a 38-month engagement from October 2020 to December 2023, delivered through the agency MarketMindshift, the SEO program built a keyword-driven Education Center architecture, ran monthly technical audits, and optimized the site page by page. One year in, non-branded organic clicks had grown roughly 10x (January 2021 to January 2022).
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
Ent had the branded demand any financial institution would envy. In Q4 2020, branded search carried nearly all of the site's organic traffic. What the site could not do was capture anyone who did not already know the name: in January 2021, all non-branded queries combined produced only a small fraction of one percent of the site's clicks.
The Education Center, the content hub built to answer exactly those questions, was effectively invisible. The site's flagship financial education query sat at position 100 with zero clicks, and the Education Center's URLs registered almost no non-branded traffic.
Underneath the content problem sat years of technical debt: 404 errors redirecting to the homepage, redirect chains, missing canonical tags, spam URLs being crawled by Googlebot through an injected trademark-script path, and crawl-stat analysis showing Googlebot spending more of its budget on the login subdomain than on the main site, routed through 302 redirects that should have been 301s. Page-speed analysis later flagged Largest Contentful Paint problems across six core page templates.
The Work
What Was Done
Architecture before optimization
The engagement opened in October 2020 with a keyword-driven site architecture: a three-level Education Center taxonomy mapping roughly 240 keywords, each with search volume attached, so every article had a defined place and target. A companion prioritization built from more than 21,500 keyword-URL pairs of Search Console data assigned 251 priority keywords to new and existing pages.
A technical audit program that never stopped
Fourteen monthly technical audit workbooks ran from November 2021 through January 2023, each logging issue counts, priorities, status, and a clear owner split between the SEO side and Ent's development team. In 2023 the program matured into twelve monthly crawl audits, each closing with a month-over-month issue diff report so fixes and regressions were visible at a glance.
Page-by-page on-page optimization
Between January 2022 and January 2023, ten monthly batches delivered 163 page-level recommendations, each with the URL's current rankings, a rewritten title, a rewritten H1, and specific internal-link anchors and targets. Eighty-five of those URLs were confirmed completed by the client team during the engagement.
Redirect and 404 remediation
Nineteen remediation deliverables between February 2021 and May 2023 cleaned up 404s redirecting to the homepage, region-based redirect problems, and lingering error URLs surfaced by each monthly crawl.
Structured data at scale
FAQ schema question-and-answer copy was written for location and product pages, and 67 Education Center video pages received ready-to-paste HowTo and VideoObject JSON-LD, each delivered with its own rich-results validation link so the dev team could verify before and after deployment.
Content strategy and local visibility
The program produced content plans for top landing pages, homepage headline mockups, a rates-page content outline, and a 2023 action plan that rewrote titles, metas, H1s, and content outlines for nine declining URLs while benchmarking a new banking and savings hub strategy against a major national competitor. Local work included Google Business Profile recommendations and a Colorado city targeting analysis for Ent's branch locations.
The Payoff
Results
All growth is shown as multiples, percentages, or ranking positions from Google Search Console and SEMrush for ent.com, with time windows as labeled. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client. Given the collaborative, agency-based nature of the engagement, results reflect growth during the SEO program. Performance data available on request.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Non-branded organic clicks, all queries | Jan 2021 baseline | Roughly 10x (Jan 2022) |
| Non-branded impressions | Jan 2021 baseline | Roughly 2x (Jan 2022) |
| Top Education Center article | 0 clicks, 0 impressions (Jan 2021) | One of the site's top non-branded pages (Jan 2022) |
| Flagship education query | Position 77.6, 0 clicks (Q1 2021) | Position 2.3 (Q4 2021) |
| Companion education query | Position 100, 0 clicks (Q1 2021) | Position 7.9 (Q4 2021) |
| Related calculator query | Position 75.1, 0 clicks (Q1 2021) | Position 14 (Q4 2021) |
| Keywords gaining vs. losing clicks | 3,186 gained, 1,223 lost (Q1 to Q4 2021) | |
| Site-wide impressions | Q4 2020 baseline | +51.5% (Q4 2021) |
| Site-wide clicks | Q4 2020 baseline | +10.0% (Q4 2021) |
The pattern behind the numbers matters: nearly all of the top-gaining keywords were non-branded financial education terms, which is exactly what the Education Center architecture was built to win. The gains held, too. Through early 2023 the Education Center remained one of the site's largest sources of non-branded clicks and impressions. Not every window was up and to the right. An early 2023 year-over-year review showed branded queries and several education terms declining, and the program answered with the declined-pages action plan and the banking hub strategy rather than letting the losses drift.
Tools used: Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush (Position Tracking and Organic Traffic Insights), Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, Google Rich Results Test, and W3C markup validation.
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