Background.

Friends Capital are independent mortgage and loan specialists. Friends Capital’s qualified advisers search the UK market to find you the right mortgage for each customer.

Friends Capital work with the UK’s leading mortgage, loan and insurance companies and have forged long term relationships over many years, affording them access to the best products at the lowest possible rates to pass onto customers.

Goal.

The primary goals were to increase search visibility on a local and national basis for 15 commercial terms, and to achieve a set cost per lead within Google Adwords. When we started both local and national keywords were nowhere to be seen.

Organic Search was a completely new channel for Friends Capital.

Before any new traffic could be received Friends Capital were keen to see if they could convert more efficiently with the current levels of traffic.

Approach.

To begin, the overall marketing strategy involved technical SEO and a complete rebuild of the existing Google Adwords account, which simply hadn’t been able to achieve the cost per acquisition needed.

By increasing the existing conversion rate across all channels more leads would come into the business, even before traffic increased through organic search. User testing took place with people who fitted the exact persona of a Friends Capital client.

Results.

All local keywords ranked on the first page of Google within 3 months.

User Testing highlighted several issues, which when isolated and fixed, took the overall conversion rate from 2% to 6%.

Traffic increased by 215%, which converted at a rate of 7% for organic search.