BayCoast Bank: Ranking First at Home
Search Engine Optimization
Content Strategy
Web Development
Winning the organic battleground
BayCoast Bank has been part of southeastern Massachusetts for generations. But in search results for the market they’ve served the longest, they were ninth.
That’s a common gap. Community banks build reputation locally over decades, then get outranked in their own footprint by national institutions with bigger content budgets and aggregators that scrape everyone. The work was to close it.
Challenge
Findable where it matters most
BayCoast is a well-established institution with a strong presence in banking. And rankings that didn’t reflect it. Keyword performance and site health both needed work, in a competitive landscape where the bank was losing local visibility to institutions with no actual presence in the market.
The goal wasn’t traffic volume. It was being first for the searches that produce customers in the towns BayCoast actually serves.
Strategy
The unglamorous work that moves local rankings
We concentrated on high-intent local terms (i.e. the “bank,” “best bank in,” and market-name phrases people actually type when they’re ready to open something) paired with disciplined optimization of Google Business Profiles and location pages.
That combination is what moves a bank in its own market. Technical site health, page speed, internal linking, and content built around real local intent. Between January 1 and May 14, 2024, the site recorded 38,501 organic users: a 30% lift year over year.
We also built content supporting BayCoast’s specialty commercial lines, moving hundreds of additional banking terms from second page to first.
Team Insight
Seeing the optimizations we’ve made contribute to BayCoast’s success with their terms climbing higher and higher on Google, is an incredibly rewarding feeling. It highlights the immense value of SEO in the banking industry. We are continuously making optimizations to improve their rankings, and I love tracking this progress each month. SEO can be a long game, but the effort and research invested in keywords truly pay off in the long run.
Results
Traffic that acts
BayCoast’s organic traffic doesn’t just arrive; it engages at 70%, which on a bank site means people are reading, comparing, and applying rather than bouncing.
Local terms in BayCoast’s primary market, New Bedford, moved from ninth to first. Location terms moved from third to first, driven by optimization of Google Business Profiles and location pages. Hundreds of additional broad banking terms moved from second page to first.
