How PNC Increased Traffic by 567% in 6 Months with Conductor

About PNC

Headquarters

Pittsburgh, PA

Company Size

75,000

Industry

Financial Services

For more than 160 years, PNC has been committed to providing clients with excellent banking services and robust financial expertise to help clients meet their financial goals.

Introduction

For enterprise brands like PNC, a sophisticated organic marketing strategy is key to reaching its target audience and staying ahead of competitors. Developing a strong organic marketing strategy is notably more complex for brands with websites as large as PNC’s. Enterprise SEO requires the right resources, technology, and internal SEO expertise to be successful, which equates to hiring the right talent and getting buy-in from stakeholders to secure budget. In order to gain buy-in, SEOs need to prove the value of SEO, which can be a challenge.

When SEO Marketing Manager and VP Eric Mayhue began working at PNC, SEO was not a top priority for the organization—it was an afterthought. He knew he had to find a way to communicate the value of SEO to gain buy-in from key stakeholders and access the resources needed to build a mature SEO function at PNC that would drive results. Eric also knew he needed more than a set of point solutions to improve PNC’s traffic, track keywords, measure performance, and identify technical issues.

If you want to build a sophisticated, enterprise SEO strategy, you need a true partner, not just a tool. Conductor is exactly the partner we needed.

The Challenge

It took PNC some time to realize the value of SEO and invest in it. Up until 2018, PNC’s website management was incredibly fragmented. Multiple IT and engineering teams had siloed responsibilities for managing and maintaining the website, hindering any chance of developing a single, sophisticated SEO strategy. PNC’s website had a lot of potential but required an incredible amount of coordination and work to make it a meaningful organic traffic driver for the brand. Eric knew he needed an enterprise solution and, more importantly, a partner to help him optimize PNC’s website.

The Selection Process: Why Conductor?

PNC needed more than a few small SEO tools to remedy its internal silos and fragmented site. It needed an SEO platform that could serve as one central source of truth for website metrics, provide insights for optimizations and technical fixes, track progress, and measure results. Eric began vetting SEO platforms. After a thorough and lengthy evaluation, Eric chose Conductor. Conductor’s platform provided one place where SEOs, content teams, and web developers could align in researching, executing, and measuring the impact their work had on PNC’s website performance. From a personal perspective, Eric felt confident that Conductor truly understood the needs of an SEO.

Conductor’s robust features also stood out from the pack. Explorer provided Eric with actionable semantic insights and allowed him to develop a research process to best understand what PNC’s customers were searching for with every new piece of content. Conductor’s keyword research allowed Eric to discover the most searched topics of this audience and uncover customers’ intent with Conductor’s index of 20B+ keywords. Conductor’s end-to-end platform was a no-brainer for someone looking to break down silos, centralize website data into one source of truth, and build an SEO center of excellence.

Eric was also impressed by Conductor’s pace of innovation compared to the other platforms, boasting dozens of product releases and updates in a short timeframe. New functionality and features continue to be released in Conductor on a monthly basis.

Choosing Conductor over other platforms on the market was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my SEO career.

How Conductor Helped

Eric found that Conductor’s technology allowed him to quantify the value of SEO to different stakeholders in his organization by tying results to the KPIs that were most relevant to them. It was much easier to get internal buy-in around SEO when Eric was able to customize and automate his reporting for each stakeholder. This allowed Eric to communicate the value of SEO in terms each stakeholder intimately understood.

With insights from Conductor, Eric was able to make small changes like editing title tags to be more descriptive and see immediate results via increased organic traffic. By leveraging features like Content Guidance, Eric cut down the time it took to create content and optimization briefs from hours to minutes. PNC also leveraged insights from Content Guidance to research thought leadership topics for top-of-funnel content creation to assist with its brand awareness.

Market Share allowed Eric to gain competitive insights and track which topics other brands were seeing success with, giving PNC insight into more topics of interest for their target audience. Reports that previously took hours were now automated and ready in seconds. By uncovering opportunities to beat out the competition on SERPs, Eric was able to build a winning content strategy rooted in SEO.

Conductor’s technical audit helped Eric identify issues with the PNC website before they spiraled out of control. Ensuring their website was technically sound helped their most valuable content get found and rank higher in SERP.

Conductor has been absolutely instrumental in the success we’ve had in organic marketing.

The Results

Six months into PNC’s partnership with Conductor, its local SEO traffic increased by 567%. There were other monumental wins, like increasing visibility on page 1 of Google for keywords they didn't rank for previously and discovering new keyword opportunities to drive more organic traffic. Additionally, Eric could now identify technical SEO issues and resolve them before traffic was impacted. He believes that every part of the Conductor platform contributed to the improvements that transformed PNC’s website.