Case Studies: Griffin Funding | Inseev Interactive

Case Study

Client Overview

Griffin Funding is a mortgage lender specializing in non-QM loans. Although Griffin services most types of home loans, the mortgage industry crowded and Griffin has carved out a few very specific niches in certain types of loans for individuals who may have trouble qualifying for traditional government-backed mortgages. Griffin operates in 7 states and is continuously expanding their geographical reach.

Client: Griffin Funding

Website: griffinfunding.com

Date: April 2, 2020

Business Type: E-Commerce

Services:

Content MarketingLink BuildingContent Full Service Orchestrated SEOWeb Design/Development

The Situation

Griffin Funding had been handling their SEO strategy in-house while utilizing various vendors for authority building and content creation. The team had gotten some traction but wanted to reduce internal responsibility for the channel and have a trusted partner take over the day to day responsibility of growing the SEO profile.

Although we have many different ways we work with companies on the SEO side, our ideal set up is to be a full service partner and be fully responsible for the performance of the account. For Griffin Funding, the reality is that an SEO strategist typically needs to spend around 10 hours a month actually doing SEO work, while allocating the majority of the SEO investment to the expansion of content and authority.

What Happened

Although Griffin had a strong foundation, there were still areas that needed improvement. During our research phase we identified some key areas for opportunity that we started executing on immediately:

Strategy 01

Service Page Improvements

The majority of strength in the SEO profile was coming from a single page, “bank statement loans.” When we took over Griffin Funding was ranking in position #7. The page that was ranking for this term had a significant amount of opportunity in our view.

We designed and developed a new page with robust expanded content and focused on improving user experience. Since launch of this page, Griffin Funding is now consistently in position 1 for this coveted term and many related variants of the term.

Strategy 02

Architecture Recommendations

One of the first things we noticed when auditing the site was a lack of subdirectories within the URL structure, and a lack of architecture to the site in general. Not only did we need to improve the internal linking on the site, we also needed to create a URL pattern that bots could understand.

We re-wrote all URLs on the site and re-worked the navigation to include a number of our high value pages. These changes helped to show the hierarchy of content and services on the site for a user, but also added key relevancy signals through internal linking, breadcrumbs, and keyword optimizations.

Strategy 03

Indexation Issues

Just because a site is on WordPress doesn’t mean the site is technically sound. WordPress actually has many default settings that can inflate the index with low-quality pages. This was the case for Griffin Funding, and upon digging in we learned that only about 40% of indexed URLs were true pages that we wanted users to see. These low-quality pages were coming from media attachment images, a common issue amongst WordPress sites.

We noindexed these pages, and some other low-quality pages to help maintain the site’s technical health. Although there’s no evidence this was hurting the domain from performing well currently, there’s always the possibility if the issue were to exacerbate that it could be a hinderance to growth.