How Fabrizio Ballarini Grew Wise’s SEO From 20 K to Millions in Monthly Visits

Welcome to Market Movers: Building Brands and Links with Linkifi!
Your go-to podcast for transforming your business into an unforgettable brand where branding meets SEO and link-building. I’m Chris Panteli, Co-Founder and CEO of Linkifi, and I’m joined by my co-host and Co-Founder, Nick Biggs.

In this episode we welcome Fabrizio Ballarini, Head of Organic Growth at WISE (formerly TransferWise). Hired as SEO employee #1 back in 2015, Fabrizio has helped the fintech rocket from ≈20 K non-brand visits a month to multiple millions, handling everything from CMS builds to a high-stakes 2021 TransferWise → wise.com migration—without losing traffic.

 

Key Talking Points

✅ Building SEO from a Blank Slate – Why Fabrizio’s first 100 days focused on CMS architecture & in-house engineering firepower
✅ 12-Month Domain Switch Playbook – The phased, no-content-changes approach that kept billions in cross-border payments flowing
✅ Product-Led Page Generation – How WISE scales millions of long-tail pages with tech, not content farms
✅ Word-of-Mouth vs. Search – Balancing a referral-heavy growth engine with non-brand SEO expansion
✅ Surviving AI Overviews – Where WISE sees impact, why it’s monitoring rather than panicking, and how LLM-driven agents fit into future workflows
✅ International Rollouts – Launching localised sites & country calculators as WISE entered new markets
✅ Seasonality & Macro Shocks – How currency volatility and politics influence search demand in fintech

 

Quotes from Fabrizio Ballarini

📢 “In 2015 we had brand traffic and a couple of help-centre articles—now SEO drives millions of sessions every month.”
📢 “For the domain migration we changed nothing except the URL. Same content, same architecture—that’s why it worked.”
📢 “AI overviews haven’t cratered us. Some sections dip, others spike. It’s too early to chase every fluctuation.”
📢 “If tomorrow Google search vanished, we’d still serve our 10 M+ active users—SEO is a bonus, not a single-point failure.”

 

Actionable Insights for Listeners

🚀 Build with Engineers – A dedicated dev squad early on can outscale any content budget
🔄 Phase Big Rebrands – Test on a sandbox domain, then redirect in stages to isolate risk
🔍 Target the Long Tail – In opaque industries (like FX fees) create calculators & FAQ hubs to surface hidden pain points
🤖 Experiment with LLM Agents – Automate briefs, mapping & internal QA, but don’t rewrite strategy on day one
📉 Monitor, Don’t Panic – Track AI-overview impact by section; double-down where intent still clicks through
🌍 Localise Intelligently – Pair in-market translators with scalable templates for cost-efficient global coverage

 

About Fabrizio Ballarini

Fabrizio Ballerini is the Head of Organic Growth at WISE, where he leads product SEO, editorial content and technical growth engineering. Since joining in 2015 he’s overseen WISE’s expansion into 70+ markets, a complete domain rebrand, and the launch of WISE Platform for banks.

📬 Connect with Fabrizio on LinkedIn

 

🚀 Build Your Brand with Real Links

 

At Linkifi, we help ambitious brands scale organic visibility through digital PR, brand storytelling, and SEO strategy. Book your FREE strategy session today:
🔗 https://calendly.com/linkifi/pr

 

👋 Connect with your hosts:
👉 Chris Panteli on LinkedIn
👉 Nick Biggs on LinkedIn

 

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🌍 https://marketmoverspod.com