Background

BNP Paribas is one of the world’s largest international banks. It operates in 77 countries across 5 continents and employs more than 189,000 people around the world. Since December 2017, we have worked closely with its wealth management division in Asia, which covers Hong Kong, Singapore, and India.

The target clientele for BNP Paribas’ wealth management services are high-net worth (HNW) and ultra-high-net worth (UHNW) individuals: people with investable assets of at least USD $1 million and USD $30 million, respectively. This niche usually consists of entrepreneurs and family business owners.

BNP Paribas trusted us to grow the organic visibility of its new Asia wealth management site to attract high-quality leads.

Challenges + Goals

BNP Paribas launched a new domain to promote its wealth management services with a focus on Asia. Growing the new site was a challenge: Starting from scratch, it did not have the same strength and authority as older sites owned by the company.

This lowered the new site’s ability to rank for competitive keywords and thus attract more organic traffic. The client was competing for traffic with not only direct competitors, but also its own existing websites.

It was also challenging to attract the right audience to the site, as the new site targets users in 4 different Asian countries within a single sub-folder.

With no internal SEO team and no previous engagements with other digital agencies, BNP Paribas Wealth Management entrusted us to build a foundation for SEO from the ground up.

Goals

• Boost organic visibility of its new Asia wealth management service
• Attract more high-quality leads
• Improve brand awareness in local markets

KPIs

• Increase monthly organic traffic
• Improve keyword ranking performance

Our key challenge was to get our target audiences in the local markets to visit the new wealth management site, rather than either the client’s other local websites or competitor sites.

Strategy + Execution

We started this project with a two-headed approach:

1. A comprehensive audit to identify and solve any technical issues with the site
2. In-depth keyword research to discover which terms to target on their pages

The technical site audit was conducted to establish a strong baseline for SEO—without the right technical foundations it becomes harder (or even impossible) for a site to rank. We also put in place a technical framework that helps the site correctly target users in each of the target markets.

Comprehensive keyword research was conducted to identify the actual terms that the niche target audience—HNWIs and UHNWIs—uses when searching the web. It was also crucial to localize these terms to each of the target markets.

Then, we helped BNP Paribas Wealth Management optimize its pages to ensure its content matches actual search terms and intent.

We started writing new blog content and designing engaging infographics on a monthly basis, based on the topics of interest that we identified through keyword research.

We also provided a detailed analysis of the site’s backlink profile along with ongoing link-building strategies and a concrete list of opportunities to contact to advance the site’s authority.

As a result of our ongoing content strategy, technical consultation, and page optimizations, we saw a continuous and significant improvement in keyword rankings in each of the local markets:

Google Hong Kong

• Core keywords ranking in the top 50 mobile results increased by 228%.
• Core keywords ranking in the top 50 desktop results increased from 7 to 23.

Google India

• Core keywords ranking in the top 50 mobile results increased by 140%.
• Core keywords ranking in the top 50 desktop results increased from 5 to 12.

Google Singapore

• Core keywords ranking in the top 50 mobile results increased by 500%.
• Core keywords ranking in the top 50 desktop results increased from 3 to 18.

All of this worked together to create a 137% increase in organic traffic overall, with new blog content consistently appearing in the top 10 organic landing pages.

We are proud to have worked with BNP Paribas Wealth Management Asia since 2017 and look forward to continued success and a strong organic presence in its target search markets.