Financial services SEO case study: +289% visibility growth in 30 days
THE EPIC WIN
Level Agency helped IRA Financial, a leader in self-directed retirement investing, bounce back fast after a site migration with a bold SEO playbook. In 30 days, results smashed expectations.
This financial company SEO case study demonstrates how disciplined technical work and content alignment can create rapid recovery and growth after a website migration.
THE CHALLENGE
In the highly competitive self-directed retirement and alternative investment space, IRA Financial faced several challenges:
- Significant keyword volatility and traffic loss from a major site migration
- A need to quickly rebuild domain authority and search rankings
- Gaps in technical SEO, including duplicate pages and crawl errors
- Aggressive competition from peers like Equity Trust and New Direction Trust
- Limited prior AI-optimized search visibility
- Maintaining momentum for high-intent keywords post-migration while reducing brand confusion between IRA Financial and IRA Financial Group
Additional complexity: The migration involved three domains.
The team chose to migrate onto the weakest domain because it offered the strongest long-term URL and scalability.
This decision added complexity, as it required redirecting from the authoritative site to a domain with no existing rankings. The move carried inherent risks, including loss of backlinks, redirect chains, and ranking instability, but it was critical to establishing long-term SEO health.
THE ANALYSIS
Level’s SEO team conducted a full audit and benchmarking initiative before and after the migration:
- Audited all three domains to evaluate SEO strength, backlink profiles, and overlap, determining the optimal consolidation path to minimize risk and maximize authority transfer
- Conducted a thorough technical SEO audit, resolving priority issues including duplicate titles, broken links, and 404 errors
- Set up post-migration tracking to benchmark domain health and measure progress in rankings, visibility, and authority over time
THE INSIGHT
Through this analysis, the team discovered that migrating to the historically weaker domain (irafinancial.com) offered the best long-term potential for SEO scalability and site integrity.
Although it had no existing rankings, the domain’s clean structure and brand-aligned URL made it the ideal foundation for growth. This deliberate, counterintuitive move allowed Level to centralize ranking power, rebuild credibility quickly in AI-optimized search results, and establish a stronger technical base for future expansion.
Additionally, the data showed a need for stronger entity signals to differentiate IRA Financial from IRA Financial Group, improving search clarity and brand accuracy across both Google and LLM-driven platforms.
THE STRATEGY
To regain and surpass pre-migration performance, Level deployed a data-driven, AI-focused SEO playbook:
- Implemented AI SEO enhancements using best practices for structured data, content hierarchy, and semantic markup.
- Launched new product pages informed by competitive research and searcher intent
- Built a content and internal linking plan to reinforce backbone pages and recapture lost keyword positions
- Expanded keyword footprint through new blog topics and ongoing optimization of top-performing pages
- Improved site speed and overall health, achieving an 89% site health score (top 10% of industry benchmarks) toward experienced investors with multiple holdings
- Reduced brand confusion for Google and LLMs by clarifying entity signals and optimizing schema
THE RESULTS
See how Level Agency achieved meteoric SEO growth for IRA Financial in just 30 days.
After relaunching on the newly consolidated domain, IRA Financial’s performance exceeded expectations across visibility, rankings, and AI-optimized search performance.
Keyword growth
- +160% total keyword growth in 30 days — from 3,650 to 9,477 tracked keywords. This rapid expansion reflected both recovery from migration and new market capture through AIO-optimized content.
Search visibility surge
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+289% increase in overall search visibility, climbing 11.4 points (from 3.94% to 15.34%) across 296 tracked keywords.
IRA Financial also reached #1 visibility among tracked competitors, overtaking long-standing market leaders.
AI Overview rankings
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+531% growth in AIO rankings — from 22 to 139 rankings
Optimized page templates and structured content helped AI systems recognize key product and service details, improving visibility in AI Overviews and increasing traffic from high-intent queries.
Additional milestones
- 335% growth in Page 1 keyword rankings. IRA Financial’s visibility on the first page of Google jumped from 13.6% to nearly 60% of all tracked keywords.
- Domain authority increased from 26 to 30 in just one month, achieving gains that typically take several months for comparable sites.
- The new consolidated domain outperformed all three legacy sites combined, even though it was built on the historically weakest domain.
SUMMARY
Level Agency’s website migration strategy helped IRA Financial recover from traffic loss, rebuild search authority, and achieve record visibility growth in just 30 days.
By consolidating three domains into one unified site, the team eliminated brand confusion, improved technical SEO, and strengthened entity signals for AI-driven search.
The result: 289% visibility growth, 124% keyword growth, and a climb to #1 search visibility in one month all after migrating onto the historically weaker domain.
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