This project was for a bank in Nepal, and I delivered it while working at Encore Media. It had two parts: launching a completely new website without losing the authority the old one had built up, and then strengthening the bank’s placement for the most competitive searches in its industry.
The challenge
The main task was to launch a brand-new website without losing existing authority, while getting more than 100 keywords and the bank’s money pages ranking within three months. A new site is a risky moment for any established business: every page that people already find through Google has to arrive safely at its new address, or the visibility it earned can fall away.
Beyond the launch, the bank needed stronger placement for highly competitive industry terms and clearer authority signals for Google’s ranking systems.
What I did
For the launch, the work started with technical groundwork. The core of a safe website migration is redirection mapping: pairing each old URL with its closest new equivalent so that visitors and search engines are sent to the right place. Alongside that came chain resolution, which means removing redirect chains so that an old address points straight to its final destination rather than hopping through several steps.
I also carried out extensive keyword research and intent mapping, so that each page was matched to the search intent it should serve. Then came a refined on-page structure, metadata adjustments, schema alignment, and infrastructure and canonicalisation work for the newly made site.
For the competitive terms, the approach was on-page refinement, structured content created for banking queries, schema adjustments, focused internal linking, and strategic alignment between SEO and PR.
Results
The launch work produced:
- Impressions growing from 2.87 million to 6.36 million in three months.
- More than 40,000 clicks through intent-focused content.
- First-page rankings for 100+ banking keywords.
The work on competitive terms produced:
- The number one position for “Best Bank in Nepal” in the search results.
- Appearances in Google AI Overviews for banking terms.
- Stable placement at the top for high-intent industry searches.
What this shows
A new website does not have to mean starting again in search. If you are planning a rebuild, the redirect map, the canonical setup and the keyword-to-page mapping deserve as much attention as the design, and they should be settled before launch day rather than after the traffic drops.
The second lesson is that ranking for competitive terms rarely comes from one change. Here it came from several working together: clearer content for the queries people actually search, structured data, internal links and PR pointing the same way. Financial firms in the UK face their own rules on how products are promoted, which I cover on my page about SEO for banks and other regulated financial firms. Every market is different, and no past result predicts yours, but the order of work carries over.
