When we started working for them, The House Crowd was repositioning from an equity crowdfunding to a peer to peer lending business. With no history in the peer to peer space the company required:

  • intensive credibility and awareness building
  • a lead generation engine in the most competitive organic search arena – lending and investment

Objectives

  • Raise awareness of The House Crowd’s new peer to peer offering including its Innovative Finance ISA, it’s SIPP and its property development products
  • Increase lead generation from organic search

Strategy

We developed a bespoke PR-led SEO strategy that featured:

  • In-depth keyword research, identifying 13 bottom of funnel topic clusters as well as additional long tail middle of funnel blog opportunities
  • Technical site fixes to ensure optimal search engine ranking
  • New bottom of funnel website content to attract and convert high value ready to buy leads
  • New blog content to drive traffic into the top of the funnel, increase search term relevancy and develop internal linking opportunities
  • PR for brand and link building, and expertise, authority and trust (EAT) reinforcement, particularly important for Your Money Your Life (YMYL) websites

The results

In two years, the campaign delivered:

  • Over 140 pieces of positive coverage in the personal finance, business and national press including coverage in: yahoo! Finance, Investors Chronicle, Daily Express, The Time, Bloomberg, Love Money, YourMoney.com, Forbes, whatinvestment.co.uk, MoneyWeek, Which!, City AM, Metro, Business Insider UK
  • Interviews with The Daily Telegraph, Moneywise and The Daily Mail
  • 58 followed links from contextually relevant high-quality editorial publications with an average DA of 44
  • 116 implied links through brand mentions
  • First place rankings for lead generating keywords including:
    • secured peer to peer lending
    • property investment opportunities
    • short term peer to peer lending
    • short term p2p lending
    • development investment opportunities
    • property development investment
    • peer to peer secured lending
  • Top 20 rankings for keywords including:
    • peer to peer lending – 9,900 searches a month in UK
    • p2p lending – 1,900 searches a month in UK
    • IFISA – 1,000 searches a month in UK
    • innovative finance isa – 1,900 searches a month in UK
    • peer 2 peer lending – 320 searches a month in UK
    • peer to peer investing – 320 searches a month in UK
  • 26% of all onsite goal completions generated from organic search 

“Definition helped us reposition the business – we pivoted from equity crowdfunding to peer to peer lending and the team reinforced this with media coverage in the personal finance and national press. They achieved record rankings for peer to peer lending and property investment keywords, by developing optimised content for our website and powering it with contextually relevant followed links from the media coverage generated. I would happily recommend them.” – Founder and CEO, Frazer Fearnhead