Case Study 4

FundedNext

Case Study Overview

FundedNext is a forex proprietary trading firm that funds traders to prop trade with Forex pairs, Indices & Commodities with up to $300,000 on a FundedNext account and keep up to 90% of the profits they make.

Their unique features are 15% profit from challenge phase, balance based drawdowns, no time limit challenges and up-to $4 Million scale up plans. They are one of top three prop firms in the world as of 2023.

When I started working on this project, at the start of 2023, their organic traffic wasn’t high enough and organic visibility from Google was relatively low, compared to its competitors and other top prop firms of the world.

So, their objective from the SEO game was simple. Higher Organic Traffic, Organic Visibility throughout Google and Higher Keyword Rankings on their niche keywords. It was just the game’s nature was a bit complex.

Objective:

1. Organic Traffic Increase. As they mostly relied on paid traffic, this became a necessity for future sustainability.
2. Increased Branding through Organic Visibility throughout Google and other search engines.
3. Keyword Ranking in relevant searches in the niche.
4. Cater to Global Audience. Rank high in every country’s SERP.
5. Better analysis, reporting & insights of SEO activities & ROI.

Challenge:

• The first and foremost challenge was organizing all SEO activities. As not much attention was given to proper SEO before, everything was scattered and needed to be organized properly.
• Lack of proper On page & Technical SEO Activities.
• Apart from the main domain, they had a separate subdomain for blogs. For various reasons, it had to be maintained separately.
• Catering to global SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).See, SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) vary from country to country. For example, What ranks 1st in Google in the USA, may not rank 1st in Australia.As they are a global prop firm, catering to traders from almost all the countries of the world, the biggest challenge was ranking and bringing relevant traffic from various country SERPs.
• The keyword “funded” is extremely synonymous with many other prop firms & competitors in the industry.
  Search indexes often mix them up, even ranking competitors on our branded keywords.(Like Next Funded; who ranked 2nd & 3rd on the keyword “funded next”; and stole over 25% of our clicks.)
• Proper tracking, ROI, analysis and reporting of all SEO activities (even to local level SERP). Giving a Numerical & Contextual Value of how much SEO is contributing to the overall growth of the firm.

Solutions:

1. Conducted thorough keyword research tailored to multiple countries’ SERPs, including local language keywords.
2. Developed keyword vaults for our brand and competitors, acting as comprehensive repositories for organic traffic, paid ads, and YouTube strategies, providing insights into keyword-driven clicks or impressions across all country SERPs.
3. Implemented a scheduled blog publishing strategy targeting precise keywords, enhancing the ranking and visibility on keywords like growthnext, incenteco, consistency, non-consistency account, compound trading strategy etc, which drove traffic and fortified our E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) within the industry.
4. Optimized existing pages and posts using targeted keywords, improving rankings on brand-centric and other relevant keywords.
5. Mitigated competitors ranking on our keywords, notably the term “funded.” Promoted variations of our branded keywords across various platforms, reclaiming our keyword rankings.(E.g; Next Step Funded stole many of our branded traffic & clicks by ranking on our branded keywords. But now, we reclaimed our rankings & traffic from those keywords.)
6. Removed harmful backlinks, engaged in PR activities across diverse communities to acquire high-quality backlinks, and addressed major technical SEO issues found in audits, improving user metrics like page loading times and bounce rate.
7. Collaborated with the Tech Team for seamless execution and troubleshooting, addressing some persistent Technical SEO challenges like new 404 & 500 pages, broken codes, tags, duplicacy, canonical issues, indexation issues etc.
8. Maintained ongoing collaboration with the Media Strategy, Social Media, and CPM Teams, recognizing their collective impact on Off-Page SEO and overall organic performance.
9. Adopted a structured keyword tracking methodology for performance gauging and areas of enhancement identification, complemented with regular monitoring.70% of our organic traffic came from branded keywords. Which was a collective effort of integrated marketing through SEM, SMM, Communities, etc.30% of our organic traffic came from non-branded keywords which was a direct effect of SEO effort.

Results + Timeline:

Insights:

• Impressions, Clicks, and Organic Traffic Increased from 3x to 4x, doubling each quarter, along with CTR with a steady increase.

• On average, 63.5% of it came from Branded Keywords (which have a mixed impact from all marketing and communication channels.) and the rest 36.5% of it came from Non-Branded Keywords which are a direct result of SEO Activities.

• In terms of keyword rankings, we got on the first page of Google for 46 unique keywords (U.S SERP), covering 5,760 search volume per month.

• If we were to get this much Branding, Traffic, and ranking from PPC, it’d take us $131,431. (Till Q3)

• In terms of Revenue, from March to October $3,769,723 (appx) has been generated from Organic Channel. Over $1.1 Million came in October alone.

• $2,393,774 came from Branded Keywords, $1,375,949 came from Non-Branded Keywords.

• Our Backlinks, Technical Health, and blog Subdomain have been performing well but need dire attention moving forward if we want higher rankings, branding, and revenue organically.

• After integrating SEO practices in Youtube impressions & views increased by 200%+ in Q3 alone.