Increase in position 1-3 rankings on Google year-over-year (181 to 2,288).
Increase in organic search traffic year-over-year.
Increase in “Select Offer” conversions year-over-year.
Lantern’s Mission is to help people realize their dreams by providing the knowledge and tools they need to find and choose the best financial product for them. Lantern helps both small businesses and individuals find the right financing solutions. With one online application, potential borrowers can compare, and review product offers they are eligible for. Partnering with top lenders in the fintech space, Lantern provides a myriad of product offerings for personal loans, student loan refinance loans, credit cards, auto loan refinance loans, life insurance, small and medium business (SMB) loans, and mortgage loans.
Lantern’s top competitors (Nerdwallet, Bankrate, and Credit Karma) have aggressive content marketing strategies, robust backlink profiles, and were dominating the search engine result pages (SERPS). While Lantern had some foundational content to leverage, the website simply did not have the content depth required to compete. The Lantern category pages lacked the brand authority and link equity required to gain organic search visibility for competitive, high-volume, non-branded search queries, and there was very little content supporting the less competitive, informational keyword sets. A more aggressive content marketing and SEO strategy was needed to compete and win in a heavily regulated, saturated industry with evolving opportunities and headwinds.
The goals were simple: Increase organic search share of voice and start taking it away from top competitors. Increase organic traffic by 400% and rely less on paid search. Increase the number of completed Select Offers (conversions), improve overarching domain equity, and lay the foundation for future SEO success.
Our efforts encompassed in-depth research, targeted content development, Digital PR, and the implementation of technical SEO best practices.
In-depth research helped us to better understand user intent, competitiveness, and to identify and prioritize gaps in both content and organic search visibility. Access to Google paid search data was fundamental to our keyword selection and content production roadmap. Given the lack of organic visibility, paid search had become the primary driver of new visitors. We scored non-brand keywords individually based on the number of impressions, their click-through rates, the average cost-per click, and most importantly the number of conversions each keyword delivered over a 30-day period.
Our strategy was to increase semantic relevance for high scoring, uber-competitive transactional “head” keywords. We would do this by building greater content depth via the less competitive informational “tail” queries. 6 content hubs were established and lived under a newly created “/learn” folder, right off the LanternCredit.com root: Personal Loans, Small Business Loans, Student Loans, Credit Cards, Auto Loans, and Mortgages. These keywords had 3,000,000+ supporting keyword derivatives and search demand estimates of over 92,500,000/month tied to them.
On a weekly basis we developed and launched new content clusters for each of our 6 hubs (800+ content pieces): in-depth articles, guides, tools and calculators, how to’s, what is and answers to frequently asked questions. This helped to expand our keyword universe and develop the critical E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals that both Google and potential customers are looking for. E-A-T is part of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and an important component of its algorithm.
As a relatively new domain, Lantern needed a robust digital PR strategy to help disseminate its story, promote the newly created content, and boost page and domain equity. We leveraged existing relationships with publishers and influencers in both the financial and investment space. Current and ongoing news events related to COVID’s impact on small businesses along with multiple interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve created tremendous digital PR and content placement opportunities. Rising search demand for loans that provide relief for small businesses helped us prioritize content creation. We capitalized on this opportunity by placing more than 500 pieces of high-quality content in publications such as The Business Journals, Time Magazine, LA Opinion, and Fox Business. Each outlined Lantern’s differentiators, value proposition, features, and unique approach to lending. A robust internal linking strategy to the primary navigation and across newly developed content pieces helped to increase Googlebot crawl activity, indexation, semantic relevancy, and page authority for all 6 content hubs and their clusters.
“NPD has been a key partner to executing our performance marketing, pushing for product advancement and testing data-driven tactics to optimize our business. As we continue to advance our optimizations and data-driven integrated marketing solutions with NPD as a partner, we fully expect our marketing momentum to further accelerate.”
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