The challenge: to acquire local leads through organic search in a saturated & competitive industry.
As an entrepreneur, you have to handle everything yourself. It can be difficult to grow if you don't have a partner to help you in areas that are manual & time-consuming.
This is why Kellen joined Ranked. Being in the mortgage industry, it can be extremely difficult to acquire new customers through anything other than AdWords & Facebook Ads. Kellen's target keywords were filled with big name mortgage brokers, which made it difficult to rank for the long-term.
Focusing on high conversion keywords
On our initial keyword audit, we found that the sites that were ranking for specific mortgage products. Kelly's target customer base was very specific, so we had to create an optimization, outreach & content plan to rank for longtail keywords that acquire the right type of customer.
- Longtail keywords had a much higher conversion rate.
- Competitors had optimized poorly for longtail keywords.
- No content plans on competitor sites - they were completely inactive.

The solution: a localized content plan, detailed optimization & industry related backlinks.
Kellen only wanted to rank in Waterloo, which allowed us to focus on a specific set of service related keywords. By tracking competitor sites for a week, we were able to see what pages were ranking highly for specific search terms & which were declining due to specific optimization changes.
By working with Ranked, Kellen was able to acquire high-quality leads through localized longtail keywords. This included publishing our weekly blog content, data driven optimization & backlinks that were acquired from mortgage-related media sites.
As a result, Kellen was able to achieve:
- First-page rankings on both competitive & longtail local keywords.
- Increased customer acquisition through organic search
- Significant ad spend reduction on AdWords & Facebook