Boosting SEO with Personalized, Dynamic Content Widgets

Project Overview

Facing challenges from search engine algorithm changes, the partner company transitioned from static to dynamic content on its debt-related articles. By implementing a system that updated content strips periodically, we managed to demonstrate to search engines the relevance and freshness of their pages, significantly improving crawl rates and organic traffic.

Problem Statement

A leading financial services company utilized a content strategy focused on attracting SEO traffic with reviews, calculators, and educational content. However, due to search engine algorithm updates, targeting outdated content was challenging. Recognizing the need to signal content freshness to search engines, the company implemented a new approach to transform its SEO efforts.

Execution

We saw an opportunity for the company to leverage its unique data insights to create a dynamic content strategy. This would demonstrate the presence of fresh, relevant content for search engines and users alike.

High-level requirement:

1. Added a content strip to every debt article.
2. Selected the content strip randomly (generate a random ID or another approach to randomizing).
3. Updated the content strips on every debt article every ~ 7 days.

• Researched DB options to use for Content Strip and landed on MySQL DB
• Created a spreadsheet with variable data (titles, opening lines, and paragraphs)
• Set a cron job (Cloud scheduler)
• Handled the update logic of Content Strip and created several cron jobs using Terraform to:
  • Generate Variations for Content Strip once every 3 months: takes a new unique combination of variables from the spreadsheet and stores it in DB.
  • Sync CMS pages with DB: to check the newly created CMS pages and store page IDs in DB( to map the variations with those pages by the crone job below)
• Updated content strip daily at a fixed time of the day:
  • Map-generated variation with pages
• Implemented dynamic date updates and cache clearing using webhooks to trigger the actions:
  • The date should dynamically be updated whenever a content strip is updated on the page
  • The cache should be cleared when the page content strip is updated: this in turn updates the publish date in CMS, causing caches to be cleared. Meanwhile, Sitemap.xml is also updated.

Results

The continuous content updates across the pages led to a significant increase in the crawl rate by search engines. This resulted in a phenomenal 3x growth in organic traffic within a few months, showcasing the power of dynamic content for improved SEO and user engagement.