Who is AdvancePoint Capital?

AdvancePoint Capital provides an alternative to banks and the Small Business Administration (SBA) for loans for small business owners. The company has a nationwide presence and specializes in providing loans for restaurant owners, merchandise retailers, manufacturers and medical providers.

Finding an Agency That Provided Value

When AdvancePoint Capital contacted Sure Oak, the company already had worked with three other companies within the past year. They needed an agency that could genuinely improve their rankings in order to drive more leads from organic search. That’s why they chose to partner with Sure Oak.

Shifting from PPC to SEO

Like a lot of clients we work with, AdvancePoint Capital wanted to reduce how much they were spending on PPC ads and divert more of their marketing budget to SEO. On top of that, PPC ads in their vertical are extremely costly — at the time this was written, the CPC for “small business loan” was nearly $73.

Competing Against Industry Titans

As the fintech sector grows, more businesses are exploring alternatives to traditional sources of funding, like bank loans, which typically require trips to the bank, consultations and paperwork. This is where companies like AdvancePoint Capital come in, but there are a lot of loan providers out there, and AdvancePoint Capital needed a strategy that was unique to their specific, highly competitive vertical.

Due to the competitiveness of the business loan industry, a comprehensive SEO strategy was the primary way to increase the company’s visibility in search engines. Existing pages on the site needed to be re-optimized, new pages targeted at previously unexplored high-volume, low-competition keywords needed to be created and the site needed more high-quality authoritative backlinks pointing to it.

Sure Oak identified keyword phrases that had the most opportunity to rank on the first page of Google and generate clicks. Some aligned with existing pages; others required new ones. But, in only a few months, the pages targeting those keywords started to see significant improvements on Google:

The improved rankings resulted in an influx of leads from organic search. In fact, the number of leads AdvancePoint Capital received from organic search more than quadrupled in only four months.

Although increasing the number of leads from organic search was one of our biggest goals, it wasn’t the only one. The other goal was to increase their website’s authority. We accomplished that too, by implementing a comprehensive link-building strategy comprised of both contextual and scholarship links. Our link-building campaign helped increase the domain authority of their website from 20 to 28.

Total number of leads from organic search more than
quadrupled in only four months.

Total organic keyword rankings grew by 200% from
March – October.

Total number of clicks increased 100.8% from March – July.

Total number of clicks increased 100.8% from March – July.