AN SEO strategy for WAHED to attract more ethical investors
THE CONTEXT
Wahed offers Shariah-compliant, values-aligned investing for people who want to grow their wealth without compromising their principles. The business needed an SEO strategy that protected its high-affinity Muslim audience, identified scalable adjacent search opportunities, and clarified the technical fixes needed to improve organic visibility.
THE CHALLENGE
Wahed was dependent on a small set of high-intent Islamic investing keywords. While relevant, they were limited in scale. We needed to identify where Wahed should defend its core audience, where to expand into adjacent ethical investment searches, and how to improve its technical optimisation.
WHAT WE DID
We delivered a combined technical SEO and keyword opportunity audit across Wahed’s priority markets: the UK, USA and Malaysia. The original brief focused on around 100 priority keywords, but early analysis showed that the obvious Islamic investing terms, while highly relevant, were too limited in volume to support Wahed’s growth ambitions alone.
We therefore expanded the analysis to around 1,000 keywords, giving Wahed a clearer view of where organic growth could realistically come from. Each keyword was scored against a consistent opportunity framework — including country-level search volume, traffic potential, ranking difficulty, search intent and audience affinity — to identify which opportunities to defend, prioritise and build content around.
Alongside this, we ran a full technical SEO audit to identify the issues limiting Wahed’s organic visibility, from missing metadata and H1 tags to indexing, sitemap structure, page speed and backlink hygiene.
STRATEGIC APPROACH
We treated SEO as an audience-intent and market-sizing challenge, not a checklist exercise.
The strategy was built around a simple growth logic: protect the high-affinity core, then earn scale from adjacent, winnable markets. That meant defending Wahed’s most relevant halal and Islamic investing searches, while identifying broader investment categories where Wahed had a credible right to compete.
The goal was not to chase volume for its own sake, but to find the overlap between search demand, audience relevance, ranking opportunity and commercial intent. This led to a roadmap that balanced three priorities:
Defend high-conversion Islamic and halal investing demand.
Expand into adjacent investment searches with stronger scale potential.
Use content to remove the specific barriers stopping values-led audiences from investing.
OUTPUTS & DELIVERABLES
A technical SEO audit with a prioritised short, medium- and long-term action plan.
A keyword opportunity model covering ~1,000 search terms across priority markets.
Intent and affinity scoring to separate core, adjacent and lower-priority opportunities.
A prioritised content and growth roadmap, market by market.
Clear recommendations on where SEO should be supported by Paid Search, and where additional content creation was required to acquire organic traffic.
THE RESULT
The SEO strategy carved out a clear path to action: what to fix, what to defend, where to expand, and how to turn search demand into a more scalable acquisition channel.
We identified high-priority adjacent search opportunities and the content required to rank for them — including gold investment, a Zakat calculator and beginner-friendly halal investing content. We also prioritised a suite of technical fixes to strengthen organic visibility, from title tags, H1s and metadata to indexing, sitemap structure and secure linking.
Crucially, the work clarified the role of Wahed’s highest-affinity search market: halal and Islamic investing terms were commercially important and worth defending, but adjacent search opportunities were needed to unlock greater scale.
“Moral Media demonstrated exceptional skill — analysing complex datasets, providing insightful interpretations, and delivering actionable recommendations. Truly impressive.”