Bankrate, Inc.

NYSE: RATE

Analysis of Bankrate’s network of financial websites from a search engine marketing perspective.

The organic ranking value per month of websites in the Bankrate online network.

Strengths

Bankrate.com has excellent organic rankings and a substantial competitive moat with 42 million inbound links. “Mortgage”, “car loan”, and “best credit cards” are a few of the high-value keywords the site maintains a number one position on Google.
Content partnerships with money.cnn.com, marketwatch.com, walletpop.com, and other big name financial news websites.
Provides free content with links back to Bankrate.com used by third-party website owners.

Search engines provide answers to queries above organic results. Google Advisor ranks as the number one result with its Comparison Ad for 61% of Bankrate.com’s most valuable keywords (see mortgage, for example). Similarly, Baidu shows a calculator above Bankrate.com.cn’s organic listing (see 利息计算器, for example.)
The Google Advisor Comparison Ad appears at the top of results for the query "mortgage", immediately followed by the standard three-pack of paid ads below it.
Acquisitions of sites that used black hat techniques. Bankaholic, for example.
Pattern of links in template-based elements, especially footers, to Bankrate.com.cn may indicate paid links.

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