SEO • Strategy • Content Marketing
How Academy Bank and Armed Forces Bank Grew Site Traffic by 10x and Built an SEO-Savvy Team
The Challenge
Academy Bank and Armed Forces Bank are sister institutions under Dickinson Financial Corporation, headquartered in the Kansas City area. Academy Bank provides personal and business banking solutions, while Armed Forces Bank is dedicated to serving service members and military families.
Though familiar locally to Sparkcade, both banks operate on a national scale and were ready to level up their digital performance to match that reach. They weren't just looking to compete with regional institutions—they wanted to be in the same conversation as industry leaders.
But while their websites looked modern and professional, a deeper audit revealed critical gaps in performance, visibility, and long-term strategy.
And though another SEO firm had been previously retained, there was no ROI-based search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place. No keyword tracking that mattered. No clear workflows. No internal SEO training. Pages were designed to look good—not to perform well. And the results showed it.
At the start of our work together:
- Academy Bank's site health score was just 56%.
- Armed Forces Bank's was even lower, at 52%.
- Keyword visibility hovered under 1% for both banks.
- Daily organic traffic rarely broke 150 visitors.
- Fewer than 15 Top-10 keyword rankings between the two banks.
At a time when most consumers start their banking journey with a Google search, both banks were nearly invisible. Their internal teams knew SEO was important, but they didn't have the tools, training, or strategy to tackle it on their own.
54%
Average Site Health Score
With site health scores of just 52% and 56%, technical issues were holding back both user experience and search engine performance.
< 1%
Organic Keyword Visibility
Both banks' content was barely showing up in search results—making it nearly invisible to potential customers
0
Top-10 Keywords for Academy Bank
Academy Bank had no keywords ranking in Google's top 10 results, while Armed Forces Bank had just 11—still leaving most high-value search traffic untapped.
The Solution
We approached this challenge from two angles: fixing what was broken and building a system that could grow with the team to deliver new leads and customers.
We began by tackling the site health issues head-on. Using tools like SEMRush, we audited both sites and worked directly with the banks' internal teams and web vendors to resolve hundreds of technical errors, warnings, and structural issues. By the end of our first few months, each site had a clear roadmap for what to fix, when to fix it, and how to prevent future issues from piling up again.
Building on that foundation, we developed a long-term content and keyword strategy. We created what became known internally as the "keyword bible," a comprehensive, prioritized list of search terms that mapped to each bank's product offerings, locations, and customer needs.
From there, we optimized hundreds of existing landing pages, blog posts, and product pages—rewriting copy, refining metadata, improving headers, and aligning structure to keyword intent.
Content That Builds Trust and Visibility
As part of a broader strategy to position Academy Bank and Armed Forces Bank as trusted resources in the financial space, Sparkcade helped identify content opportunities that delivered value far beyond search traffic.
For Academy Bank, we supported the development of industry-specific whitepapers grounded in original, primary research. This included conducting targeted surveys among small business owners and banking customers to surface valuable insights on trends like digital banking adoption, financial literacy, and community lending needs.
Sparkcade then transformed those insights into professional-grade whitepapers that Academy Bank could share with industry peers, partners, and prospects—helping position the bank as a thought leader while also securing earned media coverage through primary research. This not only generated new backlinks and engagement from reputable industry publications but also expanded the bank's visibility in targeted markets.
SCOPE OF WORK
For Armed Forces Bank, we helped launch a branded podcast designed to do more than just tell stories. The show elevated the voices of military nonprofits and community partners, offering them a platform while building AFB's visibility in the military and financial ecosystems. It also gave Armed Forces Bank a powerful source of content that could be repurposed into blog posts, social snippets, and backlinks—strengthening SEO in a natural, relationship-driven way.
And on both sites, Sparkcade supported content planning and execution that aligned with Google's evolving best practices. From optimizing keywords and schema markup to improving readability and internal linking, we helped Academy Bank and Armed Forces Bank publish blog content that wasn't just consistent—it was strategic.
Today, both sites regularly publish content that helps them rank for competitive keywords while also serving their customer base with relevant, well-structured information.
Throughout the process, we held bi-weekly strategy meetings with the marketing teams—reviewing content drafts, sharing progress reports, and offering real-time SEO coaching. What started as tactical support quickly turned into something bigger: a cultural shift.
The Results
Over time, both banks saw dramatic improvements as a direct result of our work together—not just in traffic and rankings, but in the way their teams approached and prioritized digital strategy.
10x
Daily Traffic & Visibility Increase
Organic search traffic and impressions surged, bringing nearly 1,000 daily visitors to each site—up from fewer than 100 before the our SEO work together.
87
Combined Top-10 Keywords
From just zero keywords for Academy Bank and 11 for Armed Forces Bank, the two now hold dozens of high-value spots in Google's top 10 results, capturing more qualified search traffic.
75%
Average Site Health Score
With a 23% increase for Academy Bank and a 21% increase for Armed Forces Bank, improved site health scores gave both sites the strong technical foundation needed for lasting SEO performance.
Building an SEO-Confident Team
One of the most important outcomes didn't show up in a chart: the growth of a confident, SEO-aware marketing team.
The Academy and AFB teams now approach web content with a deeper understanding of how search works—and how to shape their digital footprint intentionally. They create blog posts and landing pages with purpose. They ask smarter questions of their vendors. They use reporting dashboards to make data-informed decisions. And they're experimenting with more advanced strategies, like earning visibility in AI-generated summaries on Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), where their content now appears regularly.
What began as a performance repair job became a long-term investment in culture, training, and sustainable digital growth. And with a new digital-only offering on the horizon, our work together is already evolving to support its launch—positioning DFC to grow its influence and authority with a digital strategy built for success from day one.
