Case Study: Search Mortgage Solutions
Search Mortgage Solution is a Fee Free Mortgage Broker based in Manchester.
Challenge
After years of using the same incumbent SEO agency and with Google steadily increasing the space in which ads take up versus organic results, Search Mortgage Solutions a Manchester Mortgage Broker found that Mortgage leads were staring to lower and needed to make a dramatic improvement.
In a market where that changes based on political events and bank base rates, Search Mortgage Solutions needed to focus on capturing more leads than traffic and so increasing conversion rate was of key emphasis.
Our challenge was to make Search Mortgage Solutions website more attractive to people needing a mortgage application as well as focusing on positioning key pages appose to gaining traffic from News Articles which had been a previous tactic.
Approach
After an initial SEO review of the site, we found that much of the organic traffic cam from blog/news articles on the site, however there was no real tracking in place, there were no goals set up in analytics no phone call tracking etc. The website itself also need some conversion improvements, users had to click to a contact page to get in touch with a mortgage broker.
Our approach was to:
- Initially focus on a complete tracking solution. We used Google Tag manager to set up events that would trigger a goal in analytics if someone clicked the phone number on mobile, submitted a web form or click the email us link.
- We reviewed the site for a number of SEO fixes such as broken links, http links when the site was https.
- Adding a contact form to every page
- Adding key USPs for the ‘Fee Free Aspect.
Objectives
Our objectives both from the client and our own agency perspective were to:
- Ensure all Analytics, Goal tracking was set up correctly for accurate reports going forward.
- Focus on Leads for Mortgage Broker and Mortgage Advice
- Trial an Adwords Campaign as the ad space has been taking up more space in search results.
- Improve ranking on localised search terms.
The Results
Once tracking was in place and we had a bench mark of goal / conversion rate, we could see that a lot of traffic came from ‘News articles’ but they didn’t produce any real leads. It was also apparent that Adwords should also be utilised as Google Ads now took up a huge amount of “Retail Space” on the search engine results pages (SERP’s) that organic traffic had naturally lowered.
What we did:
Our SEO audit found quick fixes to the site, whilst also changing some of the site structure to make key pages a priority of news pages (Although this created a drop in overall traffic, the users now visiting the site were more qualified and so conversion rate increased).
We rolled out usability changes to the site across main pages and key ‘location pages’, these changes were aimed at increasing conversion rate.
Overall we observed:
- Over double the conversion rate
- Previously averaging at less than 3%
- This has increased to between 6% and 8%
About the Client
Search Mortgage Solutions is a Fee Free Manchester Mortgage Broker, this main USP of the company allows users looking for a Mortgage Broker to obtain a mortgage without any ‘Fee’.
They have a head office in Manchester and regional Offices in London, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham.