The Challenge
BankBazaar had a strong brand and a well-known name in India's fintech space, but its backlink profile had not kept pace with competitors. Paisabazaar, PolicyBazaar, and ET Money had invested heavily in link acquisition — their domain authority scores were significantly higher, and this was directly translating into ranking advantages across high-volume keywords.
The challenge was compounded by the nature of BFSI link building. Most financial media publications (Moneycontrol, Economic Times, Mint, Business Today) have strict editorial standards — they won't link to a product page unless there's genuine news value or unique data. Generic guest posting doesn't work at scale in this space. We needed a strategy built on genuine editorial value, not mass outreach.
There was also a legacy issue: an older, aggressive link-building campaign from several years prior had left BankBazaar with 340+ low-quality links from link farms and irrelevant directories. These were actively hurting the profile's quality signals.
Strategy
I designed a three-pronged approach that balanced short-term DA growth with long-term link profile health:
Audited the full backlink profile using Ahrefs and identified 340 links with spam score above 45 or from clearly irrelevant domains. Submitted a disavow file to Google Search Console after manual review. This is always the first step — you cannot build on a corrupted foundation.
Created original financial research assets — EMI affordability indices, interest rate comparison studies, credit card reward rate calculators — that financial journalists genuinely want to cite. Pitched these to 60+ financial media outlets with personalised story angles. This approach generated 28 editorial mentions in publications including Moneycontrol, Financial Express, and India Today.
Identified high-authority Indian financial directories, bank partner pages, and fintech association sites where BankBazaar was either unlisted or listed without a link. Worked with the partnerships team to formalise link placements as part of existing commercial relationships. Added 67 new DR 50+ referring domains through this channel alone.
Execution
The digital PR campaigns required a fundamentally different skillset than traditional SEO — part data analysis, part journalism, part sales. For each campaign, I worked backwards from the question "what story would a financial journalist want to tell their readers?" and then asked "what data do we have, or can we produce, that would support that story?"
The most successful campaign was an original study on "How much personal loan EMI can Indian salaried employees realistically afford, by city?" Using anonymised application data (with compliance approval), we produced a city-by-city EMI affordability index. This was picked up by 14 financial publications and generated 22 editorial backlinks in a single month — the highest-performing PR campaign I've run.
Results
The DA improvement from 42 to 61 placed BankBazaar within the top tier of Indian fintech backlink profiles — directly comparable to its primary competitors. More importantly, the quality of new links was substantially higher than historical acquisition: the average DR of new referring domains was 58, compared to a historical average of 31.
Key Takeaways
The most important lesson from this campaign was that in competitive, regulated verticals, link velocity matters far less than link quality. Acquiring 5 genuine DR 70+ editorial links from Moneycontrol and Economic Times is worth more than 500 generic directory submissions. I now evaluate all link building opportunities using a "would this link exist if I wasn't trying to build links?" test — if the answer is no, it doesn't belong in a quality link profile.