Mini case study: N26 (Berlin)

N26 (Founded: 2013) is a fee-free “deposit account” online bank, Europe’s first completely mobile bank, with 2.5m customers.

Executive Summary

N26 chose to keep the same top level domain for all countries, instead of localising its top level domains. The main direct consequence is that it concentrates all its backlinks to one stronger domain.

Despite this, N26 depends very heavily on brand for organic search. Thanks to its very good brand awareness (Google Trends shows continuous increase since its launch), its organic monthly visits reaches nearly a quarter of a million visitors.

Keyword targeting for banking related terms though is currently not so successful but shows huge potential for further organic growth.

Google Trends (in Germany)

Backlink Profile Overview

• 306k backlinks from 5.5K domains.
• 87% of backlinks are from pages with little Page Authority.
• 11% of the backlinks are from German websites.
• Same top level domain, subdirectory languages for optimal united backlink profile.
• Many nofollow high PA pages: Bloomberg, filmow, espn: adverting campaigns.

Backlinks with Page Authority of 40 and above (according to ahrefs)

• Two Factor Auth List
• Techcrunch article
• Employee website
• Google Play
• Link on Dein Handy difficult to spot
• 301 redirect from opencollective.com

Organic Traffic Analysis

• N26 ranks for over 59k Keywords for 230k monthly organic visits.

Keyword targeting and Traffic

Main Keywords generating traffic:

• Brand / search terms with brand: around 210k (90%)
• Germany
• apple pay (360)
• bank (300)
• online bank (200)
• US
• bank telefon (140)
• maestro card (40)
• France
• tarifs (300)
• moneybeam (170)
• la banque mobile (90)

Pages with traffic compared to number of pages indexed

• From around 15k pages indexed, over 150 pages each get at least 10 visits per month.

Site Performance for Mobile: some images affecting speed