For the past two decades, AwardWallet has been the go-to solution for travelers looking to maximize their loyalty rewards. The platform allows users to track points and miles across more than 650 loyalty programs—from airlines and hotels to credit card rewards.
The company's educational blog is a valuable resource for users and a significant channel for SEO-driven traffic. Content covers loyalty program news, promotions, and detailed guides on maximizing travel rewards value.
This blog component has become increasingly important to AwardWallet's growth strategy, requiring more sophisticated SEO approaches.
We spoke with Erik Paquet, Director of Marketing at AwardWallet, to understand how they grew organic traffic by 45% in just 12 months.
1. Expanding their SEO efforts
Early blog content on AwardWallet was not originally created with a strong SEO focus. As Erik Paquet, Director of Marketing at AwardWallet notes:,
"Early content efforts were driven by internal priorities rather than SEO considerations, with minimal attention to keywords and competitive analysis."
Writers wrote about what they knew best—loyalty programs and rewards strategies—without considering how users were searching for this information.
For example, their blog post on “credit card reconsideration” initially saw only modest organic traffic.
Their blog posts lacked structured keyword research, competitor analysis was minimal, and content failed to align with how real travelers searched for information.
You can see this from their page’s Content Score when it was first published.
The result?
Articles like this contained deep industry insights but missed opportunities to rank for terms that would bring in organic traffic.
The post's original top keyword was the medium-volume "Amex reconsideration line" rather than more popular search terms.
Using Surfer, they identified important related queries—like “What is the Chase reconsideration line?"—that users were actively searching for.
The team revised their articles to include semantic terms and related sections, ensuring better alignment with search intent. They –
- included primary and secondary keywords
- analyzed competitor content structure
- created more comprehensive content addressing user questions
- optimized keyword placement and relevance
Just bumping this article’s Content Score by 3 points helped them surge to a 380% increase—and rank on page 1 for the higher-volume term "Chase reconsideration line" as well as their main keyword “credit card reconsideration call.”
But as you can tell, merely bumping the word count from 1726 to 1781 words couldn’t have led to such a dramatic increase.
What made a difference was updating the article to include relevant information on “credit card reconsideration calls," as demonstrated by the increase in topical coverage from 59% to 41 out of 56 information points, which is 73%.
By May 2024, the post was drawing substantially more traffic and capturing multiple related keywords, demonstrating how focusing on SEO (even for existing content) led to growth in organic visibility for AwardWallet.
2. Automating time-intensive SEO processes
Like other SEO teams, AwardWallet's content team faced a time-consuming process for each new article. Keyword research, competitor analysis, and content outlining required multiple tools and manual processes.
"Manual research for keywords and competitor analysis consumed significant time and resources. Outlining content to meet SEO objectives was inefficient, limiting scalability."
– AwardWallet’s content team
For instance, developing a guide like “How To Transfer Chase Points to World of Hyatt” required researching competitors, gathering relevant FAQs, and structuring the tutorial – a process that took many hours.
Such guides are crucial for capturing search traffic, but the manual workflow limited how quickly the team could produce and optimize guides like this at scale.
Using Surfer helped Erik and his team consolidate keyword research and competitor analysis into one interface, allowing writers to generate a comprehensive outline in 15–20 minutes instead of several hours.
This automation freed the team to focus on writing quality content while Surfer handled much of the on-page SEO tuning.
The “Transfer Chase Points to Hyatt” article ranks in the top 5 on Google for its high volume target query and related keywords.
As a result of automating SEO tasks with Surfer, AwardWallet increased content production without compromising quality, leading to scaling their blog without investing in a ton of new resources.
3. Fixing content cannibalization issues
As AwardWallet's blog grew to over 3,000 published posts, they encountered a challenge common to content-rich sites: content cannibalization.
Multiple blog posts competing for the same keywords meant they were battling against themselves in search rankings.
Their analytics revealed several instances where different blog posts targeted similar keywords, particularly around loyalty program topics. This internal competition confused search engines about which page to rank, ultimately hurting their visibility for valuable keywords.
"The team lacked tools to identify and resolve instances of multiple posts competing for the same keywords, which negatively impacted rankings"
– Erik Paquet, Director of Marketing at AwardWallet
To resolve this, AwardWallet is merging and restructuring overlapping content with separate blog posts covering similar topics around hotel status matches.
For example, as of March 2025, two of their posts focus specifically on an IHG status match promotion.
These overlapping articles mean that for queries like “IHG status match,” two different pages from AwardWallet are vying for attention.
Neither page is ranking at its full potential because they are dividing ranking signals and confusing Google about which page is more relevant.
The team can consolidate both pages under a unified article so that all SEO signals (backlinks, relevance for “status match” keywords) now point to one page instead of being split.
They will also need to update the consolidated content to ensure it answers all pertinent questions in one place, aligning it with those queries' combined search intent.
Surfer’s keyword cannibalization report can ensure that pages like these are quickly identified and dealt with.
For example, I found 12 articles on our blog cannibalizing traffic on how to use Surfer.
By eliminating internal competition through merging and redirecting content, AwardWallet improved its overall search rankings and ensured that users find a single, highly relevant page for each topic.
Results
Between March 2024 and March 2025, AwardWallet experienced consistent growth, reaching approximately 2.98 million clicks from 116 million impressions.
In these 12 months, AwardWallet’s organic search clicks increased by 45% and impressions by 52%.
