SEO Secrets of Hong Kong's Virtual Banks: Why ZA Bank is Winning

With 8 virtual banks now in Hong Kong, ZA Bank has emerged the winner when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). As the first virtual bank to launch, their website ranks for more non-branded organic keywords on page 1 of Google.com.hk than the rest combined.

There’s a direct relationship between where a website ranks and how many clicks it gets. More clicks, more business growth. How has ZA Bank been able to do it? There's many factors to Google's ranking algorithm, which I won't get into here, but from looking at their website I've identified two things ZA Bank is doing better than their competitors.

How ZA Bank is Better at SEO

1. More backlinks from sites that have high backlinks themselves

Backlinks are links from another website to your website. The quantity and quality of links to your site is a big component of Google's ranking algorithm. The easiest way to understand which sites have better backlinks is by looking at their Domain Rating, a logarithmic score of 1-100 (with 100 being the highest).

ZA Bank has the highest Domain Rating among Hong Kong's virtual banks:

1. bank.za.group - 47
2. welab.co - 41
3. airstarbank.com - 37
4. mox.com - 37
5. paob.com.hk - 32
6. livibank.com - 30
7. antbank.hk - 26
8. fusionbank.com - 20

The most interesting ways ZA Bank earned links were from their referral program and their tie-in with Deliveroo.

2. Relevant content that speaks to what people search

One of the most relevant and highest-searched keywords ZA Bank ranks for is "virtual bank", which their homepage ranks #2.

Not only does their title tag and meta description contain "virtual bank"...

...but they use the keyword throughout the content of their homepage as well.

Compare the above graph to the homepage of welab.co, their competitor who has the second-highest Domain Rating:

WeLab isn't talking about itself as a virtual bank as consistently throughout the page therefore Google won't rank it highly when people search for that.

What's next for the virtual banks?

Hong Kongers are increasingly searching Google for "virtual banks" and "虛擬 銀行" (see graphs below) and since ZA Bank organically ranks #2 and #3 respectively for these keywords they're taking the lion's share of clicks and no doubt new account openings.

Keyword: 虛擬 銀行 (virtual banks in Chinese)

Keyword:virtual banks

However, despite the initial SEO success so far, I can tell by looking at their website that ZA Bank merely got lucky rather than achieved their rankings through focus and skill. There's many areas of their website that aren't optimized and many additional relevant keywords that they don't rank for. With sustained effort, the other virtual banks may catch up and surpass ZA Bank.

Since clicks on organic search results follow a power law distribution (those that rank at the top take most of the clicks), this is going to be an interesting space to watch and a huge growth channel for whichever virtual bank gets SEO right.

If you're reading this and work at a virtual bank, you should get in touch now for more insights about your website.