The business
SBI Card (sbicard.com) is a credit card issuer and a subsidiary of State Bank of India. It offers credit cards to customers across India, with a large existing customer base and one of the most recognised names in Indian banking.
The challenge
SBI Card’s situation was the opposite of a startup’s: a big, established brand with a huge customer base. The problems were different.
- Implementation paralysis. My recommendations on site structure, mobile experience, technical optimisation, UI/UX, page speed and Core Web Vitals kept piling up. Every request for approval stalled in layers of sign-off.
- Losing generic searches to aggregators. For broad credit card searches, third-party comparison and aggregator sites were ranking above the brand itself.
What I did
With technical changes blocked, I focused on what could change without management approval: the content.
- Revamped the website’s content in phases, a section at a time, so each change stayed small enough to go live without escalation.
- Found the blogs worth saving. I identified articles that had once performed very well but had lost traffic because their information had gone out of date.
- Refreshed and expanded them, bringing the facts up to date and covering the searches people now make.
- Asked Google to recrawl every update through Search Console, so improvements were picked up quickly.
- Targeted new keywords the site had never focused on before.
Results
- ~2,000 more keywords ranking in Google’s top 10.
- ~1 million more organic visits a month by the 24th month, about a third higher than at the start.
- All of it achieved through content alone, without the development changes that were stuck in approvals.
What other large organisations can learn
- Don’t wait for the perfect project. If technical changes are blocked, content changes usually aren’t, and they compound.
- Your old content is an asset. Pages that once ranked can often be revived faster than new pages can be built.
- Submit updates, don’t just publish them. Asking Google to recrawl shortens the time between a change and its result.
Frequently asked questions
How do you do SEO when technical changes can’t get approved?
Work on what you control. At SBI Card, technical and design recommendations were stuck in approvals, so I refreshed and expanded content in phases, revived decaying blog posts and asked Google to recrawl each update. That added about 2,000 top-10 keywords and roughly 1 million monthly visits.
Why do aggregators outrank banks for credit card searches?
Comparison sites publish broad, frequently updated content that matches generic searches such as “best credit card”. Brand sites often focus on their own products, so they miss those searches unless they publish equally helpful, current content.
Can updating old content really increase traffic?
Yes. Articles that once ranked well often lose traffic because their facts go out of date. Updating them, expanding them for current searches and asking Google to recrawl them can bring traffic back faster than writing new pages.
