Bureau van Dijk (BvD) is one of the world's leading publishers of business intelligence, specialising in M&A deal data, company financials, and ownership structures. Their Zephyr database tracks global M&A transactions and was acquired by Moody's.
Bureau van Dijk needed to establish genuine organic search visibility for their Zephyr M&A intelligence platform across a highly competitive financial data landscape, while protecting existing rankings through a major domain migration.
Polaris was engaged to build and execute an SEO campaign that would make Zephyr the authoritative search destination for M&A intelligence queries in the UK and globally.
Bureau van Dijk is one of the world’s leading publishers of business intelligence, specialising in M&A deal data, company financials, and ownership structures. Their Zephyr database is a market-leading source of global M&A transaction data, tracking hundreds of thousands of deals across every major market. BvD was acquired by Moody’s Corporation in 2017 for $3.27bn.
The challenge
BvD was migrating their primary domain from bvdep.com to bvdinfo.com — a significant domain change carrying material risk to all existing organic rankings across their full product range. Simultaneously, their M&A intelligence portal, mandaportal.com, powered by the Zephyr database, had virtually no organic visibility for the high-value commercial terms their target audience of M&A professionals and corporate finance teams were actively searching for.
The competitive landscape was formidable. BvD was competing for M&A search territory against deeply established financial data publishers including Hoovers, OneSource, and Companies House, all with inbound link profiles hundreds of times larger than BvD’s at the time.
Additional complexity came from brand and product keywords being incorrectly indexed across the old and new domains, and high-value ICP pages being outranked by login pages rather than the information pages that would actually serve searcher intent.
M&A content topics
The M&A Portal content strategy was built around the full spectrum of topics that M&A professionals, corporate finance teams, and investors search for when researching deal activity. We developed and optimised content across the following areas:
Deal intelligence and data — M&A deal data, M&A transactions, recent mergers, UK deal activity, European deal activity, and global M&A deal information. All connected to the Zephyr database as the authoritative source.
News and reporting — a tiered reporting structure covering M&A week in review, M&A month in review, and M&A quarterly review. Each review type was optimised for its own cluster of time-sensitive search queries and formatted to appear for searches around recent mergers, current M&A activity, and sector-specific deal news.
Market intelligence by geography — M&A Europe content was developed as a dedicated topic cluster, alongside international and global market coverage, targeting researchers looking for regional deal breakdowns and cross-border transaction data.
Deal types and categories — content covering IPOs, private equity deals, venture capital deals, and the broader spectrum of M&A activity beyond traditional corporate mergers, expanding the portal’s relevance across the full financial transactions landscape.
Rumours and editorial — M&A rumours as a distinct content category targeting early-stage deal intelligence searches, alongside editorial commentary, expert opinion, and features from Zephyr’s own analysts — content that built topical authority for the portal as a destination for M&A insight, not just data.
Research and features — long-form research papers and expert-authored features optimised for high-intent research queries, with a structured internal linking strategy connecting all content back to the core Zephyr database proposition.
Each page was given a unique title, meta description, keyword focus, and content brief — eliminating the duplicate meta tag issues that had been suppressing visibility across the portal prior to the campaign.
Number one positions secured for brand and core product keywords including FAME, Mint, bvdinfo.com, and Bureau van Dijk across Google UK.
Top five rankings achieved for M&A intelligence queries including m&a, m&a news, and m&a deals. High-value commercial terms in a deeply competitive category.
46,000 monthly organic sessions recorded at peak campaign performance across the bvdinfo.com domain.
Existing rankings fully protected through the domain migration with no material loss of organic visibility during or after the transition.
“M&A deal data moves fast, so we had to come up with a strategy that provided a future proof solution to optimising content as it was published, as opposed to content thats evergreen.”Amo SokhiManaging Director
