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How we helped Aico improve organic traffic by 89% and impressions by 700% in 9 months

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89%

Increase in Organic Traffic

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700%

Increase in Impressions

Background

When Aico partnered with SmartClick in December 2024, the brand had strong product-market fit but minimal organic visibility. Competitors dominated the SERPs with authoritative content, while Aico’s site suffered from content decay, keyword cannibalization, and misaligned search intent. In this fintech SEO case study, we highlight how SmartClick helped Aico overcome these challenges and turn SEO into a core growth driver.

Within 9 months, SmartClick’s fintech-focused SEO strategy delivered:

Results we achieved

The Challenge: Breaking Through a Saturated Fintech SERP

The fintech SEO landscape is dominated by well-funded competitors investing heavily in content marketing. Aico faced:

As this fintech SEO case study shows, the real challenge involved establishing visibility and trust in a market dominated by authority.

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The SmartClick Approach: A Fintech SEO Strategy Built for ROI

We structured our work into five strategic phases, each targeting a specific layer of Aico’s SEO foundation.

Starting point

The website was generating around 10-20 organic clicks per day, with over 60% of the traffic landing on branded keywords.

Aico ranked for around 551 keywords in December 2024, with only 36 ranking between positions 4 and 10, and only 15 in the top 3 positions.

Needless to say, we knew we had our work cut out for us, and what we did first was analyze the nature of the fintech target audience, market, and competitors.

Phase 1: Auditing and establishing a growth strategy

The first month of our SEO collaboration started off with in-depth audits to help us uncover the true state of the website, pinpoint low-hanging fruit opportunities, and establish a growth strategy for Aico.

The audits included:

Of course, we didn’t intend to spend month one only auditing and analyzing. During our analysis, we uncovered critical issues, including clear keyword cannibalization, misaligned search intent, and technical issues such as glaring 404s, thin content, and a clear competitor gap.

We immediately began dissolving cannibalization, creating new content to fill gaps, and reoptimizing pages with thin content. Our idea is to start working on the most immediate and obvious gaps/issues we find so that we use our time productively.

After conducting every audit, we created a content calendar, a reoptimization calendar, a technical SEO action item list, and an on-page SEO action list. Once these were completed and presented to the client, we created our SEO roadmap and got started right away.

Phase 2: Building a Fintech Glossary Category to Increase ToFu Visibility

One of the most important patterns we found among top-performing competitors for Aico is that the majority of them already have a well-developed glossary category that allows them to gain visibility for many top-of-the-funnel keywords.

We realize ToFu is not the end goal the client wanted, but it was a necessary stepping stone to allow the website to compete for other transactional and MoFu fintech keywords. Our philosophy was to help the website build natural authority in the industry and gain visibility across all funnels, with a special emphasis placed on BoFu, of course.

This idea also aligned with the resources we had available for the project, as Aico had also partnered with an AI content agency that specialized mostly in ToFu content. It was a win-win situation that allowed us to utilize their resources in a beneficial way, as it would have been very difficult to use their AI content for in-depth blog posts, BoFu content, etc.

The goal was simple:

SmartClicks’ dev team helped us to seamlessly and quickly create the glossary page without disrupting the flow of the website. And soon enough, we started publishing content for the glossary at scale. Our content team did the keyword research and provided other necessary on-page input for the AI content agency, they created the content, and we proofread it before publishing.

The results?

Phase 3: Reversing Content Decay and Aligning with the Fintech Search Intent

Aico had an in-house content team at the time focused mainly on creating new blog posts. However, the practice of frequently updating and realigning content with the evolving search intent has not been established. So, one of our activities was focused on identifying content that used to perform well or has the potential to perform well, and rework it through our custom content reoptimization technique.

The results were immediate.

Our content reoptimization framework included:

The outcome: Many of the previously stagnant posts regained traction, doubling their impressions within 6 weeks and contributing to overall authority growth – a key highlight of this fintech SEO case study.

We’ve replicated this process for the majority of the older content. Not only does this help old content perform better, but it also provides a better platform for newly published content to take off much more quickly, as Google gains more trust in your website’s authority.

Phase 4: Transactional keywords and BoFu optimization

With authority established, we pivoted to revenue-impacting keywords targeting Aico’s core solutions.

Actions taken:

The results? A significant number of new transactional, commercial, and navigational keyword positions were occupied within the Fintech space, directly corresponding to Aico’s KPI search queries.

Over 40 new top 10 positions and 10 top-3 positions for high-tier KPI keywords, including:

These efforts significantly boosted Aico’s rankings for high-intent fintech terms and began generating consistent inbound demo requests via organic search.

However, the most important point we need to highlight is that, for these keywords, the competition has already established a much higher Domain Rating than Aico’s. Let’s take, for example, the current SERP for the keyword financial close software.

Aico has the second-lowest DR score among competitors. This makes it extremely difficult to climb to the top 10 to begin with, let alone to shift between the top 3 positions.

And the journey to getting there was gradual. We didn’t enter the top 10 for transactional fintech keywords immediately, but after we laid the groundwork, eliminated keyword cannibalization, refreshed content to better match the search intent, and created new high-quality content. Also, let’s not forget the role contextual and high-quality backlinks played in the process.

It’s a mix of activities that led us to reach our target and get Aico to the top for its intended KPI keywords, which ultimately led to the most important aspect of our job: getting Aico more qualified organic leads.

Phase 5: Optimizing for LLM and AI Search Visibility

As generative AI began reshaping search, we optimized Aico’s content architecture and topical authority to increase its inclusion in LLM-generated responses.

The result: Aico started appearing as a cited source across multiple LLM search models, including:

All of this helped reinforce brand credibility and expand visibility beyond traditional SERPs, leading to increased LLM traffic and a new funnel to generate organic leads.

The Outcome: Turning SEO Into a Growth Engine for Aico

What began as an underperforming website in a highly competitive fintech space evolved into a consistent demand-generation channel for Aico.

Through our data-driven, ROI-focused SEO strategy, Aico:

The collaboration between Aico and SmartClick didn’t just result in traffic growth – it positioned SEO as a core acquisition channel and a strategic advantage within Aico’s marketing mix. This B2B fintech SEO case study shows how Aico’s SEO work led to real results and long-term impact, even in a crowded market.

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