Case Study

Client: ICICI Bank is India's second-largest bank with total assets of Rs. 3,446.58 billion (US$ 79 billion) at March 31, 2007 and profit after tax of Rs. 31.10 billion for fiscal 2007. ICICI Bank is the most valuable bank in India in terms of market capitalization and is ranked third amongst all the companies listed on the Indian stock exchanges in terms of free float market capitalisation*. The Bank has a network of about 950 branches and 3,300 ATMs in India and presence in 17 countries.

Challenge: We were approached to work on personal loans and NRI division of ICICI Bank in 2003. At that time, very few companies in India were aware of search engine optimization. The internal project managers at ICICI bank for both these division had no control over ICICIBank.com website. Our initial brief was to do our work without “touching” the website. Another problem was that home page of ICICIBank.com was redirecting to an internal page. This was also affecting Google PageRank of the website.

Solutions: We realized that this was not a typical run of a mill SEO project. We were dealing with one of the biggest corporate company in India. So we had to figure out how to work on this project without doing many changes on the website. First off, we talked with the internal project manager and subsequently to the webmaster team of ICICI Bank. We asked them to remove the redirect from their home page. Next off, we suggested a sitemap for easy crawling of some of the internal pages. The next on our to do list was of course Keyword research and Title and Meta Tags. Luckily for us, since the Title and Meta tags do not affect visual element of the website, those changes were accepted. We kept our fingers crossed. We also asked them to start maintaining server log files.

Results: After five to six months of constant work, we were able to see both the NRI and Personal Loans division of ICICI Bank ranking well in Google and Yahoo (MSN was using Yahoo results at that time). According to Chetan Asher who was the project co ordinator, “We have worked with several solution providers including SEO firms to meet our client's objectives, but none had the spirit and passion to partner our clients and give them an optimum solution. But with eBrandz, we were pleasantly surprised. They went that extra mile to ensure our clients were satisfied and results were delivered. We would like to thank Milind and eBrandz team for great work and support, which played a vital role in cementing our relationship with our clients for long term business”

NOTE: The results might vary based on your area, ip address, and even personal setting of your computer.