Financial Company SEO Case Study
How Sure Oak SEO Got AdvancePoint Capital More Than 4X the Number of Leads From Organic Search
20 to 28
Domain authority increase
200%
Increase in total organic keyword rankings
4X+
Number of leads from organic search in four months
Who is AdvancePoint Capital?
This client—a well-known all-in-one HR solutions company—offers everything and does it all well. They give their all to each component of their modern HR setup, from payroll to benefits administration to time tracking to recruitment and beyond.
Many things distinguish them from their competition, but two are worth flagging here. The first is their niche: they’ve carved out an enviable reputation for themselves in a coveted market segment, namely medium-sized companies with one to five hundred employees. The second is their unusual commitment to customer service: while their technology can be easily spun up without dedicated technical knowledge, the company’s representatives also work directly with their customers to create custom conversion schedules, unique training plans, and more. Their staff is perennially on hand to make sure their customers get the most out of their product.
Advance Point Challenges
Finding an Agency That Provided Value
When AdvancePoint Capital contacted Sure Oak, the company already had worked with three other companies within the past year. They needed an agency that could genuinely improve their rankings in order to drive more leads from organic search. That’s why they chose to partner with Sure Oak.
Shifting from PPC to SEO
Like a lot of clients we work with, AdvancePoint Capital wanted to reduce how much they were spending on PPC ads and divert more of their marketing budget to SEO. On top of that, PPC ads in their vertical are extremely costly — at the time this was written, the CPC for “small business loan” was nearly $73.
Competing Against Industry Titans
As the fintech sector grows, more businesses are exploring alternatives to traditional sources of funding, like bank loans, which typically require trips to the bank, consultations and paperwork. This is where companies like AdvancePoint Capital come in, but there are a lot of loan providers out there, and AdvancePoint Capital needed a strategy that was unique to their specific, highly competitive vertical.
Solution
Due to the competitiveness of the business loan industry, a comprehensive SEO strategy was the primary way to increase the company’s visibility in search engines. Existing pages on the site needed to be re-optimized, new pages targeted at previously unexplored high-volume, low-competition keywords needed to be created and the site needed more high-quality authoritative backlinks pointing to it.
Sure Oak identified keyword phrases that had the most opportunity to rank on the first page of Google and generate clicks. Some aligned with existing pages; others required new ones. But, in only a few months, the pages targeting those keywords started to see significant improvements on Google:
Keyword Results
The improved rankings resulted in an influx of leads from organic search. In fact, the number of leads AdvancePoint Capital received from organic search more than quadrupled in only four months.
Although increasing the number of leads from organic search was one of our biggest goals, it wasn’t the only one. The other goal was to increase their website’s authority. We accomplished that too, by implementing a comprehensive link-building strategy comprised of both contextual and scholarship links. Our link-building campaign helped increase the domain authority of their website from 20 to 28.
Results
Leads From Organic Search
Organic Keyword Growth
Total organic keyword rankings grew by 200% from March – October.
Total number of clicks increased 100.8% from March – July.
Clicks From Organic Search
