Wolfgang Köhler once led the SEO and content team for Sparkasse.de. Today, he is Director Marketing & Growth for Impleco, a joint venture of cooperative banks that manages and develops a platform for leads and software.
Wolfgang is a very experienced SEO who has observed how Google and rankings change over many years. And who also knows how to manage teams and bring success to a company – with a focus on the extremely competitive financial sector.
We talk to Wolfgang about how branding affects Google rankings, how he sets up content strategy and processes internally, why the Sparkasse relaunch was so successful – and how it is that individual articles rank for thousands of keywords.
Here we summarize the highlights from our interview.
Our Guest: Wolfgang Köhler
Wolfgang Köhler has been professionally active in online marketing and SEO for over 15 years. He started his career in the classic way at agencies. There he worked as Head of SEO before moving to S-Communication Service. S-Communication is the central service provider for the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. There, Wolfgang first worked as Senior SEO Manager, then as Head of Organic Traffic, and finally as Head of SEO & Conversion Optimization.
During his time there, Wolfgang and his team also supervised and organized the relaunch of sparkasse.de. As he explains in the podcast, the website structure was completely revised, thousands of contents were revised or rewritten, and the UX was worked on – all also to rank better on Google. Today, the domain has more than doubled its SEO visibility.
In early 2023, Wolfgang then moved to Impleco, a joint venture of several cooperative banks, including several PSD banks and Bausparkasse Schwäbisch-Hall.
The Guide and Lead Portal
A central content asset of Impleco is the guide and lead portal Wohnglück.de, which Wolfgang and his team manage and expand. The website used to be a pure guide portal and has since been expanded into a search platform for houses and apartments. The guide section covers topics such as construction financing, house building, and renovation.
Thus, Wohnglück competes in Google rankings on one side with major real estate portals like ImmoScout and Kleinanzeigen, and on the other side with all construction financiers and banks. A very demanding task, especially since Wohnglück as a brand is less known than the large portals and financial institutions.
Nevertheless, the website already has over a million users per month. About half of the editorial work is put into new articles, the other half into optimizing existing content, Wolfgang reports in the podcast. Among other things, many content processes were insourced back, especially planning and control.
A central task for the next year is also overall branding, because from his perspective it has numerous positive effects on SEO, “such as relevance through Brand Search, click-through rate in search results, backlinks from other sites.” Wolfgang says in the podcast: “Successful SEO visibility on Google is not possible without a brand strategy.”
SEO Visibility Doubled after Relaunch
After sparkasse.de had shown very good, stable, but also consistent SEO reach for years, its visibility has now doubled. What happened there? Wolfgang explains the background to us in the podcast.
The Sparkasse online team began planning an extensive relaunch at the end of 2020. “We conducted very in-depth keyword research. It was clear that we still had a lot of potential in certain topic areas,” Wolfgang says in retrospect.
For this, on the one hand, 2,500 existing contents were revised and 300 new contents were created. The URL structure was completely revised, and along with it, the internal linking. But also a lot was done on the technical and UX level – a new technological basis, user interface design, content management system. The mobile experience regarding loading speed, templates, and readability was greatly improved – important because Google has a mobile-first approach.
All of this combined led to the entire domain significantly improving its SEO visibility. The entire project took 2.5 years.
When a Single Article Ranks for 8,500 Keywords
Extensive guide articles have always had good chances for SEO rankings. An outstanding example of this can be found at Sparkasse. A single article on the topic of “Bitcoin” generates tens of thousands of clicks per month via Google.
On this sensitive topic, the Sparkasse editorial team decided to report on it factually and balanced. Through the rankings, Sparkasse proves: It is capable of speaking on the topic and can inform – its customers and all interested parties far beyond. The SEO success also results from the fact that the rather traditional Sparkasse dedicates itself to such an innovative topic – and obviously many users trust to receive good information here.
As can be seen from the presentation, the article is regularly updated – a secret to success for topics that change dynamically. “One should not rest on one’s ranking successes, but always continue to work on them,” Wolfgang says in the podcast. At the same time, many other elements of the article, such as pros and cons and questions, always remain.
We also Talk about this in the Podcast
Other topics we discuss in our Content Performance Podcast:
- SEO Phenomenon in Rankings: Many regional Sparkassen rank for really difficult financial terms like “Tagesgeldkonto”. What does that say about the Google algorithm?
- Impleco offers PIA, a software product for cooperative banks. What SEO questions arise with such tools?
- How must a company be structured to be successful in SEO – especially in competitive topic areas? How should the staff be composed?
Finally, a video tip: Some time ago, we conducted an “SEO Duel” for the SEO suite provider Sistrix – a monthly ranking comparison of well-known companies. In doing so, we also analyzed the rankings of Sparkasse. Wolfgang answered users’ questions in the chat at the time. That’s how we met.
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