Driving Traffic With the Right Referrals and Ranking

Key Takeaways

‍

Brand Positioning — Branded Keywords: The majority of Borrowell’s Organic Search traffic is coming from branded keywords. This suggests that Borrowell is investing in offline brand awareness and demand, as visitors are directly searching for the brand opposed to the products they offer (i.e. “free credit report”). Consider offline marketing strategies such as podcast advertising to drive brand awareness and demand amongst your target audience. 

Referral Tactic — Free Credit Scores Tool: Borrowell uses their free credit score offering as a tool for partnerships with other financial businesses such as Canada Drives, Fresh Start Finance, and Canadian Black Book. These partnerships have contributed to a +432% YoY increase in referral traffic. Consider looking for ways to build strategic partnerships with other finance related websites through the use of popular tools like mortgage or loan calculators. 
‍
Referral Tactic — Templated Landing Pages: Borrowell uses the same template for each of its partnership pages. For their Canada Drives page, Borrowell included customized copy targeted towards those looking for car loans to help showcase how Borrowell could help them in their loan process. Templatizing landing pages makes it easy to spin up a new partnership page. Though, the real value lies in customizing the copy for each page to ensure that it aligns with the interests of the target demographic.

‍

Traffic to borrowell.com has seen a +15% YoY increase for the period of January to September. The majority of the traffic increase has been from August & September which saw YoY traffic growth of +31% & +70%, respectively. 

‍

The traffic channels (outside of Direct) that saw the most YoY growth for the period of August to September are Organic Search & Referrals. 

‍

The number of Organic Search keywords driving traffic to Borrowell increased by +182 YoY. 

‍

For the analysis period, the majority of Borrowell’s organic search traffic came from branded keywords with “borrowell” responsible for 78% of traffic. The significant amount of branded keywords suggests that Borrowell is generating a high amount of offline brand awareness which is manifesting in Organic Search.

‍

The top referral sites from August to September of this year focus on different aspects of the financial landscape such as advice, loans, rates, and giveaways.  

‍

Referral traffic from canadadrives.ca has skyrocketed this past year, reaching a high in June with a secondary spike in September. This is the result of a partnership between Canada Drives & Borrowell where visitors to Canada Drives can get a free credit check with Borrowell when they are applying for a car loan.

‍

The partnership landing page provides basic information on what a credit score is and how Borrowell works to quickly acquaint new visitors.

‍

Borrowell includes a page section about the importance of credit score monitoring with customized copy that is targeted towards visitors that are looking for a car loan.

‍

Borrowell uses this same template for its other partnership landing pages such as Fresh Start Finance & Canadian Black Book, with the main objective being to drive signups with their free credit score offer.