From 30,000 to 300,000 Organics/Month with Soumitra Sengupta 

Soumitra Sengupta helped Money View (DR 52) grow from 30,000 to 300,000 organic visitors/month in 18 months.

Money View is a fintech company with apps for consumer lending and personal finance management.

Soumitra joined our AMA session, in which we asked him many questions, including:

• What his strategy and execution of campaigns were for organic acquisition
• How hard it is to manage external PR teams
• How he cut down customer reacquisition cost by 1/5th
• What it’s like going solo and running a content-focused agency (Growth Rangers)
• How to execute communication with users throughout their lifecycle and act on it

SEO

Q: How important are backlinks in the finance space?

A: The financial services space in India is crowded with some big players who have built authority over a decade. To compete with them, any new website needs to build a solid backlink profile, along with quality content.

I believe the same is also valid in the States, where fin services/fintech is highly competitive and sites like Nerdwallet have built huge SEO machines over the years.

Q: What’s your backlink strategy?

A: Varies from client to client. The clients I have worked with so far were generally startups in the growth phase who do a fair amount of PR and branding campaigns. This essentially gets a lot of earned backlinks from authority sites in the startups/news category.

For niche-relevant links, we do dedicated outreach campaigns.

Q: How do you do KW research?

A: I start with competitive gap analysis using Ahrefs, followed by searching for low- to medium-difficulty opportunities for creating topic clusters.

Q: What are your thoughts on NerdWallet’s 14,000,000 estimated visitors per month from 17,000+ pages? Are there any other leaders in the finance space we should be paying attention to, re: organic?

A: NerdWallet is an authority site that probably everyone in finance SEO looks up to. I don’t have any idea about a similar authority site in the US. But closer to home in India, one example that I share a lot is Bank Bazaar.

Q: This journey of 30k to 300k: What were the first 3 actions you took?

A: Great question. I did simple things any SEO would do:

1. Do a competitive analysis to understand the gaps
2. Create a strategy encompassing different parts of the consumer journey—Top, Middle, and Bottom of the funnel
3. Hire a good team of Writers

I was also lucky to have an amazing Editor in-house even before I joined the org. She probably made the whole process easier by a notch with not just her crisp editing but also Writer management.

Q: What was your strategy for organic visits?

A: The strategy revolved around painpoint SEO throughout the consumer lifecycle.

• Top of the funnel content—’How to’ content related to different banks in India, e.g., Download bank statements in PDF for X bank, Check bank balance without going to the bank, etc.
• Middle of the funnel content—Loans for X, e.g., Get loans for marriage, Loan for used car, etc.
• Bottom of the funnel content—Instant loan in X city, for example

Q: What do you think about zero-volume keywords?

A: IMO, keyword tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush are great for estimating search results, but the real statistic lies somewhere between what these tools show.

Many times, I have found keywords that have zero volume in Tool 1 showing ‘some’ volume in Tool 2.

Hence my approach is—if keyword data exists in a tool, that means it has volume (even if it’s showing 0).

Q: What do you think new finance sites need to do to compete?

A: Great question. My answer is:

1. Start with a niche topic and build a cluster to develop topic relevance and get initial traffic
2. Start building authority (niche-relevant links) ASAP
3. If budget permits it, start acquiring smaller sites in the niche for lead generation and authority building

Content Writing & Publishing

Q: How important is content in the finance space? What level of importance do you place on creating higher-quality content than any other page Google could show for the KWs you want to rank for?

A: Content quality in the finance space varies based on the sophistication of the financial service. For example, lending is a simple service to sell compared to mutual funds or stock market investing, which requires consumer education. So if the product is sophisticated (mutual funds, stock investment), the content also needs to be written by subject matter experts.

Q: How many Writers did you have to create the 500+ pages of content on this site?

A: It varied from time to time. We have had anywhere from 6 to 11 freelance Writers at any given time and 2 in-house Writers.

Q: What’s your opinion on creating top-of-funnel content? Should that be the last thing I focus on, or would you advise publishing those before the higher-intent articles?

A: I always look at opportunities at the top of the funnel as most of the time it’s comparatively less competitive than conversion-focused kws.

My strategy for a new/growth stage website is to build publishing momentum + earn links by publishing niche-relevant info articles first. And then go for the money keywords.

Q: How quickly did you publish content in the early days?

A: We used to publish 10–20 articles in the first few months. Once I was able to freeze the content strategy and get an SEO Manager, we were able to scale it up to 40 articles a month.

Q: For a recently-launched site, what is your recommended cadence of volume for ongoing blog content?

A: I would start with understanding the competitive scenario. At a high level, I would do the following:

1. List the top 5 competitors in the niche who rank for similar keywords
2. Do a quick audit of their site—No. of pages published:
   1. Top pages
   2. Page clusters (no. of pages) around the keyword that you want to rank for
   3. Their publishing frequency

This should give you an idea of how many pages you need to publish and at what frequency to beat the competitors.

Cutting Down on the Customer Reacquisition Cost by 1/5th

Q: How did you cut the customer reacquisition cost by 1/5th?

A: In the beginning, the reacquisition strategy was under the Performance Marketing team and they were trying their best to re-acquire lending customers through FB and Google paid ads.

I was able to get the cost down by 1/5th in the following ways:

1. Analyzed the key points of the consumer—Avg. duration of the loan, reasons for taking a loan, avg. ticket size, and similar
2. Implemented marketing automation for the complete user lifecycle—Registration on app > Repayment of Loan
3. Mapped various points in the journey where the user could be re-engaged with the app
4. Triggered communication on low-cost channels like email & SMS at the right time for the user to take another loan

Business Strategy

Q: Does an app-based business mean employing different angles/strategies?

A: Yes, you can’t just rely on SEO/ASO. For app marketing, paid channels (Google UAC, FB App Install) play a significant role in acquisition as well—especially in a highly competitive niche like financial services.

Q: Were there any strategies that you had high hopes for but that failed miserably?

A: There are many. One such was creating city pages—personal loan in X city—at scale without much unique content.

Probably none of them ranked well for months, after which the team had to explore deeper niches—personal loan without income proof in X city—which worked.

Q: What are the 3 most important factors that contributed to the success?

A: I’d say:

1. Having a solid team—Writing, Editing, SEO Management, and Development (website performance)
2. Experimenting with solving different problems in the consumer journey through content
3. Believing in the process

User Communication

Q: How did you execute communication with users throughout their lifecycle?

A: By analyzing the following:

1. Knowing the natural frequency of conversion of your product
2. Complete mapping of user behavior from the Start (registration) to the Conversion/Exit from the platform
3. Testing inexpensive channels where users are most responsive

PR

Q: How hard it is to manage external PR teams? Is it better if it’s in-house, or do you prefer this option?

A: For this brand, we did PR activity purely from a brand-building perspective and not from an SEO perspective.

IMO, for digital PR campaigns, I would prefer an in-house team that works along with the SEO team.

For more traditional PR, I would love to work with an agency that can quantify PR campaign ROI in terms of Brand recall uplift or Organic conversion uplift.

Entrepreneurship

Q: Why did you decide to go solo?

A: I have had entrepreneurial roles in the past, hence this was a natural succession.

I also believe what makes a good Marketer better is not just the depth of experience but also the width of it. Hence, going solo allows me to work with multiple clients running a variety of businesses.

Q: What is the most important skill you learned at Money View that made the biggest impact on your entrepreneurial career?

A: Two things:

1. Data before assumptions
2. Not everyone understands a marketing plan in a spreadsheet. Sometimes a good-looking presentation is just more effective

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