focusit -
seo and content strategy
Increased keyword rankings, organic traffic, reach and social engagement for a real estate technology provider in the US
The Brief
Established in 2002, focusIT, Inc. is a Scottsdale, Arizona-based company that provides turnkey marketing and workflow management software solutions for mortgage loan officers, including sales pipeline management, compliant document sharing services and email marketing automations. Additionally, focusIT is the largest provider of Calyx Hosted PointCentral Service in the country.
While focusIT had an established website and social channels for years, they weren’t seeing much growth. Their social media handles were not growing, and their website was mostly ranking for keywords connected to the name of the brand, their products or the names of their partners. This means there was very little top-funnel activity AKA brand awareness generated through organic search.
CFD was tasked with creating and executing an organic growth plan that would establish focusIT’s digital footprint.
APPROACH
As far as approach there were a three of strategic objectives to improve focusIT’s top-funnel brand awareness:
- utilizing thought leadership with focus on the housing sector
- creating and sharing new keyword-rich blog content
- re-using content that was pre-existing on the focusIT website
Thought Leadership
CFD incorporated thought leadership, AKA sharing industry news and trends while tagging the attributed source, in order to gain traction from followers of these accounts (whom focusIT shares an audience with). As focusIT’s active social media handles were Facebook and LinkedIn, which are very hard to grow organically, this allowed the company’s posts to compete with already established channels from other brands and companies without needing to invest in paid advertising, all the while building virtual relationships with relevant thought leaders in the industry.
Content Writing
As for SEO, we focused our efforts toward content writing. For older pieces, we broadened the content and polished their structure for missed opportunities in keyword rankings. For new content, we decided to switch from just creating articles about products and services focusIT offers to general thought leadership advice for mortgage loan officers in terms of business marketing, lead generation, partnership opportunities and so on.
This allowed us to produce content that would be relevant for mortgage loan officers even if they weren’t specifically looking into software solutions for their business, thus also broadening the keyword repository from branded and product-related keywords to relevant search queries – giving focusIT visibility from a broader audience.
Repurposing content
In order to encourage more activity and referral traffic on the website, we would share old but still relevant content as social media posts weekly – designing and writing fresh visuals and copy. This allowed us to apply a more holistic content marketing approach instead of handling the blog and socials separately.
RESULTS
Social Media
Post impressions on LinkedIn have gone from an average of 300 impressions per month to over 2000, which is a 566% growth.
Additionally, focusIT’s LinkedIn page received 292 followers – a 90.40% increase (316 vs 608).
Page Views
In terms of our content writing efforts, out of 1819 landing pages on focusIT’s domain, three of our blog posts were amongst the top 30 most viewed pages on the site in the past year and four months.
Rankings
Out of the 304 keywords focusIT’s domain is ranking for as of September 2021, our blog posts account for one third of all keyword placements (101 KWs).
In total, CFD has produced and optimized 65 pieces of content for focusIT, placing industry-relevant keywords on positions 1-30 (first three pages of Google Search, where most user activity happens), such as target market for mortgage brokers, mortgage ppc, mortgage sales process, mortgage keywords list, mortgage lead management, starting a mortgage business, marketing mortgages to millennials, loan officer tips, mortgage sales funnel, mortgage pipeline software…
All of these are popular search queries for mortgage industry professionals who are potential seekers of focusIT’s services, and will allow focusIT to establish their digital presence as a thought leader in the fields of mortgage marketing and mortgage loan officer assistance.
Additionally, one of our content pieces is currently the second-highest URL on the domain in terms of traffic potential, according to SEMrush estimates.
This blog has also landed a top placement in the “People Also Ask” section for search queries containing the following keywords: “what states have prepayment penalties”, “which states allow for prepayment penalties”, “states with prepayment penalty”, “mortgage prepayment penalty by state” and “mortgage prepayment penalty Massachusetts”.
ORGANIC WEBSITE TRAFFIC
In comparison to June 2020 (our first month of content writing), September saw a significant increase in both users, new users, and user sessions from organic traffic.
We saw the same increase in organic visitor metrics when doing a year-on-year overview of the same month (September 2020 VS September 2021).
