A loans site to ~110K monthly organic visits
A finance site in one of the hardest niches on Google, grown with a team of three, topical structure and journalist-led PR instead of paid links.
- ~110K
- Monthly organic visits
- 1M+
- Ranking keywords
- $0
- Paid PR budget
- Niche
- Loans (YMYL)
- Team
- Me, a VA, one banking-graduate writer
- My role
- Founder / partner, strategy and SEO
The problem
Finance is where small sites go to lose.
Loans is a YMYL niche. Google wants trust signals, the results pages are full of big brands, and links are expensive. We had a small team and no PR budget.
What we did
Structure first, then data, then PR.
We modelled the information architecture on how the best finance publishers organise topics: pillar pages, clusters, and money pages, with calculators as brand assets people link to on their own.
Links went to pillar pages, which are roughly ten times easier to earn links for than money pages, and internal links passed that strength on. We used a Must / Should / Preferable rule for internal links after learning that seven or more per article was too many.
For PR we ran one or two journalist campaigns a week built on public and government data. No paid placements.
Using the data
Year two paid because we switched to data.
We stopped guessing from keyword volumes and clustered from Search Console impressions. Pages with more than 100 impressions got heavy edits. Pages under 100 were consolidated. Pages carrying link equity were never deleted first.
Result
Around 110K monthly organic visits.
Over a 2.5-year build the site reached about 110K monthly organic visits, more than a million ranking keywords, and hundreds of affiliate leads a month.
What carries over
What B2B sites can take from it.
Most B2B sites have the same problem in a smaller form: too many pages competing for the same intent, links pointed at the wrong pages, and decisions made from tool estimates instead of their own data. The fix is the same order: structure, data, then distribution.
Sources