SEO Case Study
Squirrel Mortgages
Squirrel Mortgages are New Zealand’s largest and most awarded mortgage brokers, having written over $4 billion of loans and helping out a lot of Kiwi families in the process.
Over the past 12 months, our award winning SEO strategies have helped Squirrel dominate organic visibility on Google and double organic traffic! According to third party SEMRUSH data, organic traffic generated is valued at over NZ$20,000 per month.
Some terms which we’ve helped Squirrel achieve first page results include “mortgage calculator” which has nearly 30,000 searches per month and “Auckland Mortgage Broker”
Get in touch with Digital Squad today to find out how we can also help your dominate your industry.
About Squirrel
Challenge
Squirrel requested we audit their existing SEO campaign and recommend a strategy to improve their current performance in a highly competitive digital marketing environment where cost-per clicks ranges between $35-$50 per click.
Squirrel was already ranking on top 3 positions for “mortgage brokers Auckland” due to their physical office location and over 1150 5-Star Reviews. However, the next phase of their growth required tapping into home buyers earlier in the research process and targeting high search volume keywords. We had our work cut out for us as this meant outperforming the major banks and interest.co.nz that dominated the first page!
Goal was to grow organic traffic and leads by 20% annually and double organic visibility and achieve an average position of 10 (first page) for 10 High Priority keywords.
Process
We undertook the following steps to craft a far superior SEO strategy:
- Comprehensive keyword research.
- Competitor keyword rankings.
- Competitor link-building strategy.
- Established purchase intent for short vs long tail keywords.
- Comprehensive technical and site architecture audit.
- Build authority and trust
- Increase direct website visits
- Improve engagement metrics
Results
Following the research and audit process, we uncovered additional keywords with 22,000 monthly searches and designed a content marketing and internal linking strategy to target these missed opportunities.
- 79% increase in organic traffic (new users) over 12 months (vs 20% expected by client)
- By volume, our campaign generated an increase of 41,522 organic users
- 68.25% increase in Organic Goal Completions (vs 20% expected by client)
- 510% growth in value of monthly organic traffic
- Our campaign also grew Keywords (number of keywords on first 10 pages of SERP) from 380 to 4,100 which is a 1079% increase.
- Increase in organic visibility (for top 10 priority keywords) from 2.7% to 48.6%
- Increase in average position for top 10 keywords from 28.4 to 4 within 12 months
- Increase in organic visibility (for top 35 keywords) from 7.2% to 23.9%
Get in touch with Digital Squad today and find out how we can help establish you as a market leader as well.
01
Initial Audit
We start with an in-depth review of your website; any previous SEO work that may have been completed, site architecture, content audit, competitor analysis and current rankings.
02
Keyword and Competitor Research
We undertake extensive keyword and competitor research to uncover keyword gaps and whitespace opportunities.
03
On-page optimisation
Technical SEO improvements to optimise site performance, speed, architecture, health and keyword alignment.
04
Content Development and Link Building
Content Strategy Development and Link Building to establish client as market leaders.