How MADX Secured #1 Cross-Border Payments Rankings for Thunes with International SEO

Client Background

Thunes positions itself as a B2B cross-border payment network that empowers businesses, enabling real-time or near-real-time payments depending on the corridor and payout method. Thunes brands its network as the ‘Smart Superhighway’ for global payments. Thunes connects banks and mobile wallets, supporting payment flows for providers, including money transfer operators (MTOs), and helps address fragmentation by improving interoperability across payment systems.

Despite being a unicorn-status enterprise, Thunes’ organic search performance did not reflect its market dominance. They had strong brand recognition. However, they were losing valuable non-branded search traffic to competitors. This was due to deep-rooted technical blockers and an unoptimized content structure.

The Challenges

Thunes needed to strengthen the foundations of organic visibility while improving how commercial pages capture non-branded demand in a competitive fintech category.

Indexation and crawl constraints: Our audit surfaced 111+ key pages unintentionally set to noindex, preventing them from appearing in search. We also found crawl inefficiencies, including orphan pages, HTTP/HTTPS inconsistencies, and unoptimized image assets that reduced crawl efficiency and page quality signals.

Limited coverage of high-intent “money terms”: While brand messaging was strong, key commercial themes were not consistently mapped to decision-stage search intent. Core pages such as Cross-Border Payments and Money Transfer Operators needed clearer intent alignment and tighter on-page structure to compete for non-branded demand.

Authority gap against incumbents: Page-one competition for high-value fintech terms is dominated by incumbents with deep link equity. Several priority commercial pages lacked enough high-quality, relevant backlinks to consistently compete for competitive queries.

Our Approach

To address these challenges, MADX delivered the trifecta: technical remediation, commercial intent alignment, and authority building. The objective was to unlock indexation, improve relevance for buyer-led searches, and strengthen trust signals to support sustained organic growth.

1. Technical audit and indexation remediation

Screenshot of indexation report / crawl findings
We prioritised issues directly limiting organic visibility, including:

• Removing unintended noindex directives from key pages
  
  
• Resolving crawl inefficiencies (orphan pages, protocol inconsistencies)
  
  
• Improving asset hygiene (image optimisation and performance fundamentals)

Fixing indexation and crawl constraints ensures priority pages can be discovered, crawled, and ranked reliably.

2. Commercial intent mapping and on-page optimisation

Screenshot of Cross-Border Payments / MTO page before and after
We rebuilt commercial pages around how buyers actually search and evaluate providers by:

• Mapping priority “money terms” to specific landing pages
  
  
• Aligning page structure to decision-stage intent
  
  
• Strengthening internal linking between related commercial and supporting content
  
  

Commercial pages rank more consistently when they match intent, communicate value clearly, and are supported by a coherent internal structure.

3. Authority building for competitive terms

Screenshot of backlink gap analysis/target publication list
We focused on quality-led authority growth by:

• Identifying link gaps versus incumbents
  
  
• Targeting relevant, high-authority industry publications
  
  
• Building links to priority commercial pages and supporting assets
  
  

In competitive fintech SERPs, authoritative backlinks remain a key signal for trust and ranking stability.

The Results

By firing all three cylinders across technical remediation, commercial intent alignment, and authority building, Thunes saw improvements across indexation, rankings, traffic, and site stability.

Indexation and visibility recovery

We removed unintended indexation constraints across priority templates, restoring search eligibility for 100+ key URLs and allowing critical pages to surface and contribute to organic growth.

Commercial rankings

Ahrefs Rank Tracker reveals dominant page-one visibility for priority keywords across key markets: #1 for “cross-border payment” (US), #1 for “cross-border payment process flow” (US), and #1 for “cross-border payment solutions” (UK). This extends to multiple additional page-one rankings in payments and payouts categories.

Organic traffic growth

Organic traffic surged 55% from January (12.4K) to December (19.2K), driven by improved technical health and structured topic clusters capturing non-branded demand.

Technical stability

We improved crawl and site consistency by resolving recurring issues month over month, including 404 errors, redirect inefficiencies, and image optimisation gaps, helping maintain a reliably “healthy” technical baseline.

Authority gains supporting revenue pages

We avoided a blog-only link strategy, channeling authority to priority product and service pages. From November 2024 to September 2025, this delivered 55 premium backlinks, 550 supporting links, and 75 brand mentions, primarily to commercial URLs.

Key Takeaways & Lessons

1. Technical Health is the Ceiling for Growth

The most brilliant content strategy would have failed if we hadn't fixed the 111 non-indexed pages. You cannot rank content that Google refuses to index. Technical resolution was the primary catalyst for growth.

2. Commercial Pages Need Direct Backlinks

Many companies only build links to their blog. Thunes succeeded because we built links directly to Product Pages using commercial anchors. This signaled to Google that these pages were authoritative endpoints for transaction-intent queries.

3. "Freshness" is a Ranking Factor

The content logs proved that updating old content (e.g., 2024 Trends $\rightarrow$ 2025 Trends) is just as valuable as writing new content. Maintaining existing rankings requires constant vigilance and updates.

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