TLDR
- Who: Cubux, a personal and home budgeting mobile app that came to NUOPTIMA after a Google penalty wiped out its SEO progress.
- What changed: We ran a recovery and scale project: disavowed toxic backlinks, built dedicated target keyword landing pages, and published hundreds of articles to rebuild topical authority and drive app installs.
- The number: 120x organic traffic increase, reaching 5,000 organic visits and 20,000 organic keywords.
120x
Traffic increase
5,000
Organic traffic
20,000
Organic keywords
About Cubux and the challenge
Cubux is a mobile app for personal and home budgeting.
Cubux came to the NUOPTIMA team after a heavy penalty from Google. The previous SEO agency had acquired inauthentic backlinks to work around Google's algorithm. Cubux saw short term results, but once Google rolled out a new update the domain was quickly deranked and a huge amount of SEO progress was lost.
We took this on as a recovery and scale project. The goal was to win back the traffic Cubux had lost and to start ranking for new, important keywords. That mix of penalty cleanup and rebuild is exactly the kind of work our fintech SEO team handles.
Who we were targeting
Cubux needed to reach two overlapping groups: people actively shopping for budgeting software, and a broader iPhone-owning audience who could be introduced to the app through relevant content.
- People actively searching competitive, transactional terms like "home budgeting software," "personal budget software," and "free budget software," reached through dedicated target keyword landing pages.
- Cubux's ideal consumer persona at the time was an iPhone user, so persona-led articles on iPhone topics were used to build topical authority and funnel a broader audience toward app installs without risking the fragile domain with new backlinks.
- Russian-speaking users were the existing base, with an identified opportunity to expand into English-language search as a second audience segment.
What we did
After a technical audit and deep research into the latest Google algorithm update, we prioritized cleaning up Cubux's backlink profile. Our research also surfaced a blue ocean opportunity: Cubux could expand more aggressively from Russian into English. Finally, we found the site lacked dedicated landing pages for its key search terms, which we addressed immediately. The three workstreams below cover the technical foundation, the landing pages, and the content.
Backlink cleanup
55
Backlinks disavowed
Cubux had acquired a large number of toxic backlinks, the main cause of Google penalizing and deranking the site. You could see it in the lost traffic for any non-branded search keywords.
The NUOPTIMA team manually sorted through every backlink Cubux had acquired since inception and disavowed the ones we believed were hurting the site. This kind of off-page work is often the difference between a stuck domain and a recovering one.
As we disavowed backlinks, we quickly saw Cubux's search visibility improve. The improvement was enough that we chose not to acquire any new backlinks, given how fragile the domain still was.
Landing page creation
After agreeing on target keywords for Cubux, we built dedicated landing pages for each one as part of a comprehensive Fintech SEO strategy.
For example:
- Home budgeting software
- Personal budget software
- Free budget software
Target keywords for any business tend to be more competitive and transactional, so they take longer to rank as you build topical and domain authority in the niche.
That is why the first thing we do with more than 90% of our SEO clients is build out target keyword landing pages, giving them as much time as possible to rank.
Content writing
100k+
Words written
316
Articles published
There were a small number of transactional and informational keywords tied to personal budgeting software, and we wrote content for those in the first few months.
To support those pages without driving backlinks (which would have risked the fragile domain), we focused on building topical authority around the ideal consumer persona.
At the time, Cubux's app was only available for iPhone users. Working with the Cubux team, we identified a broader set of keywords their ideal consumer persona would use and created hundreds of articles targeting them.
The result was a large influx of potential Cubux users, who were then shown a variety of conversion blocks and display ads to encourage app installation.
You can see some example content pieces below.
Example content
Results
Cubux's organic traffic grew 120x over the engagement, reaching 5,000 organic visits and 20,000 organic keywords, as shown in the growth chart above. The recovery started with the backlink cleanup, when search visibility began to climb after we disavowed the toxic links, then compounded as the landing pages and 316 published articles built topical authority and pulled in a steady flow of new app users.
Key takeaways
- A Google penalty is recoverable without new links. Disavowing 55 toxic backlinks alone lifted Cubux's search visibility, which is why a clean off-page profile matters more than volume.
- Build target keyword landing pages first. Competitive, transactional terms take the longest to rank, so we front-load them for more than 90% of clients to buy time for authority to build.
- Topical authority can carry a fragile domain. Hundreds of persona-led articles rebuilt Cubux's fintech SEO footprint and drove installs without risking the site with aggressive link building.
If your site is recovering from a penalty or ready to scale, book a call and we will map out the path.