How Wise's UX and marketing strategy captures millions organically

Did you know Wise's calculator attracts 40.7 million organic visitors every month? Interesting, right? Let me help you understand how that scales up. They are using two growth strategies: Programmatic SEO and Side project marketing.?

A few years ago, the marketing team at Wise analyzed consumers' behaviour in searching for the latest currency exchange rates on Google before making any payments.

They utilized this behaviour as an opportunity and started working on a side project - an exchange rate calculator. This classic example of side-project marketing involves creating valuable tools like calculators, converters, and quizzes to promote and attract new customers.

With keywords like "exchange rate calculator," this calculator alone brought around 30k unique visitors to the website monthly.

The marketing team came up with a better idea after observing the calculator's success. They noticed that instead of searching for exchange rate calculators, many people searched for the exchange rate between two specific currencies, such as "USD to EUR rate."

So, they decided to create thousands of pages for all possible currency combinations. Users would discover the calculator pre-loaded with their desired currencies on each of these pages.

This is why, if you search for the keyword "USD to EUR rate," one of the top results is a page on Wise's website titled "US dollars to Euros Exchange Rate." This page has the same calculator but stands as its distinct page, with its unique heading and keywords.

This is clever because it is much easier for this specific page to rank for the "USD to EUR rate" keyword than for the default exchange calculator page.

Some quick math will tell us that there are thousands of possible combinations between all currencies. Wise has made a specific page for each of these combinations, and they all rank among the top results.?

But how did Wise manage to create thousands of pages? Did they have interns toiling away full-time to build a new website for each possible combination?

Actually, no. They harnessed the power of?automation. And here lies the key to this strategy, known as?Programmatic SEO. It involves programming and automation to generate thousands of unique pages targeting less competitive,?long-tail keywords?with relatively few searches. However, these keywords attract a significant influx of new visitors when aggregated.

This strategy brought in humongous organic visitors, so the Wise marketing team decided to push the strategy even further. They realized that some people were searching for the specific quantities they wanted to exchange, such as?"100 USD to EUR."?So, they created pages for significant amounts of currencies in all languages.

When I say "significant amounts," I mean they created pages for nearly every typical number. They didn't just stop at a page for "100 USD to EUR" but also crafted pages for exchanges like "196 Dollars to Euros" or "301 Dollars to Euros."

The result of this combination of the Side Project Marketing strategy and an extreme version of Programmatic SEO is that Wise was able to create?258,065 pages, which brings them?40.7M organic users?per month.

Here's the exciting part, and UX come into play. All of this effort makes no sense if you cannot convert visitors into customers. Wise achieves this in multiple ways:

Firstly, the calculator's primary CTA is a "Send Money" button, which drives the visitor to a signup page.

Additionally, they strategically placed this banner directly below the calculator and strategically changing the banner based various data.

Moreover, they added a section to convince users that using Wise is a better alternative than using their banks and other services.

Finally, they offer users the option to set alerts for specific exchange rates. This allows them to collect their email address and send promotional emails to convert them into customers.

This strategy worked well for Wise UX and marketing. What could have been done better? Share your thoughts in the comments!