PrivateLenders.com was acquired by Connected Investors eXchange (CiX), a B2B lending platform for real estate investors. While CiX, who is also a Thumbstop Media client, is positioned as a matchmaking service for aspiring property flippers and landlords, PrivateLenders.com offers a more pragmatic take: compare private loans and get your investment funded.
Our task was to improve PrivateLenders.com so that we could send more qualified leads to CiX. We saw this brand as an excellent way to diversify our lead generation efforts and generate additional revenue for CiX. We decided to see how much traffic we could attract with the power of a conversion-optimized website — and we were amazed by the results.
A Website Friendly to Both Bots and Humans
We got to work optimizing the PrivateLenders.com website with a better UI and content that would attract organic traffic. One of the main problems with the original site was that the underlying architecture was not conducive to crawlers — or human visitors, for that matter. We decided to challenge ourselves to transform the site map and launch an SEO-friendly, conversion-optimized website site in just 90 days.
We performed both back-end and front-end development to ensure that the lead generation funnel and content map worked well together. This was definitely an opportunity to flex all our website muscles: our goal was to get the product to market as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality.
We’re pleased to report that we not only met our goal of launching within 90 days, but also achieved top SERP rankings for all target keywords and geographic areas. Our secret? A robust information architecture, clean user flows, and pages that were coded back-to-front for maximum SEO.
The Power of Organic Traffic
We wanted to prove that a B2B company does not need to run expensive PPC campaigns to generate high-converting leads. After all, the whole point of CiX is that specific messaging in a well-refined pipeline connects the right leads with the right lenders. So, PrivateLenders.com was an opportunity for us to essentially split-test CiX’s core value proposition with different messaging.
The PrivateLenders.com site focuses on capturing leads who have a good sense of the type of funds they’re seeking. They can search for a particular lender or query by state. We also put the company’s metrics front and center, further appealing to prospects who are very numbers-focused. In short, PrivateLenders.com is a way to provide leads with a bit more control in their search, This helps warm up leads before they get in touch with a potential lender. Ultimately, they still end up in CiX’s pipeline. We set up a hybrid contact form that blends the original CiX inquiry with this new positioning.
We also leveraged the PrivateLenders.com blog as a way to attract traffic. The overall feel of the site is highly tuned into the real estate investor who knows what they want— no matter how experienced they are. Our well-built content scheme and SEO-friendly coding worked: the number of high converting leads, doubled within the project’s first 90 days and has continued to experience an amazing 10-15% growth per month.
The Results
Our optimization of PrivateLenders.com resulted in an impressive $300,000 in additional revenue for CiX. Best of all, this was completely generated from organic traffic — no paid media. This meant an incredible ROI for CiX and a complementary positioning of PrivateLenders.com to attract highly discerning real estate investors. Overall, we were happy to see how a strong website build could provide this level of intangible value for our client: that ultimately, the message matters and content is indeed king!