BankBazaar — Site Health Overhaul

The Challenge

BankBazaar operates one of India's most competitive fintech websites — over 15,000 pages spanning personal loans, credit cards, insurance, and investment products. Despite strong content and significant brand authority, the site was consistently underperforming in organic search relative to its potential. Pages were ranking on page 2 and 3 for keywords they should have dominated.

When I audited the site in early 2023, the picture became clear: the technical foundation was silently undermining every piece of content and every link built over years of effort. Crawl budget was being wasted on near-duplicate parameter URLs. Thousands of pages had thin content flags. Core Web Vitals scores were failing on LCP and CLS. Structured data was inconsistent or missing on product pages. And several high-value category pages were accidentally noindexed — effectively invisible to Google.

Strategy & Approach

Rather than trying to fix everything simultaneously, I structured the work into three prioritised phases based on impact-to-effort ratio:

Execution

The most complex part of this project was the coordination. Technical SEO changes at scale require sign-off from product, engineering, and legal teams at a financial company. I learned to frame every recommendation in terms of revenue risk rather than SEO best practices — "these 47 product pages are accidentally noindexed, which means Google cannot rank them for loan queries generating ₹X in monthly conversions" lands differently than "we have indexation issues."

I built a prioritised issue tracker in Google Sheets, categorised each issue by severity (Critical / High / Medium / Low) and owner (SEO / Dev / Content), and ran a weekly sprint review with the engineering lead. This visibility kept fixes from stalling in backlogs.

For the Core Web Vitals work, I used a combination of Lighthouse CI integrated into the deployment pipeline and manual PageSpeed Insights testing across the 50 highest-traffic templates. Rather than asking engineering to fix everything, I provided component-level recommendations — which specific scripts to defer, which images to convert to WebP, which third-party widgets to load conditionally.

"When Lochan showed us that three of our top credit card comparison pages were noindexed, we realised how much traffic we were leaving on the table." — BankBazaar Product Manager

Results

Within 6 weeks of phase 1 completion, Google Search Console showed a marked increase in indexed pages and a reduction in "Discovered — currently not indexed" notices. The LCP improvement from 1.8s to 1.1s moved the key product page templates from "Needs Improvement" to "Good" in Google's CWV report — a signal that typically correlates with a ranking boost within 2–3 crawl cycles.

Key Takeaways

This project reinforced several principles I now apply to every technical SEO engagement. First, a crawl audit is not a one-time exercise — it needs to be part of a monthly technical health monitoring workflow. I automated this with a Screaming Frog scheduled crawl and a GSC API dashboard that sends weekly alerts for new crawl errors.

Second, Core Web Vitals are fundamentally an engineering problem dressed up as an SEO problem. The SEO's job is not to fix the code, but to diagnose the issues accurately, translate them into engineering tickets, and build the business case for prioritisation. The SEO who understands LCP waterfall analysis will always get their tickets to the top of the sprint.

Third, internal linking is the most underrated technical SEO lever in large sites. Adding 2,100 orphaned pages back into the internal link graph effectively tripled their crawl frequency — without touching a single line of content or building a single backlink.