Technical audit
The site loaded slowly, and slow pages kill the user experience. We cut load times, added local business schema markup, and deindexed the pages that shouldn't have been competing in search at all.
← All results
Search Console · +192%
▲192%
increase in organic traffic
How a local lender grew into a three-state competitor
Affiliated Mortgage set out to expand across Arizona, South Dakota and Montana. We rebuilt their search foundation from the ground up, and organic traffic grew 192%.
ClientAffiliated Mortgage
IndustryMortgage & real estate
ServicesTechnical SEO · Local SEO · Content
Search Console · +192%
0%
Increase in organic traffic
0
States targeted
#1
Outranked Quicken Loans locally
client overview
The goal: go regional
Affiliated Mortgage is a mortgage lender and real estate company based in Rapid City, South Dakota. In 2020 they set out to become a regional lender across Arizona, South Dakota and Montana. Admate and Blair Allen Agency are helping them get there with SEO and digital growth marketing.
the audit
What we found
Before touching anything, we mapped exactly what was holding the site back.
01
No foundation to build on
The site had no sitemap and no keyword research. Everything had to be built from scratch so affiliatedsd.com could rank for the keywords that actually mattered.
02
Pages competing with each other
Duplicate content ran across many pages, and several were chasing the same keyword. The site was splitting its own authority instead of concentrating it.
03
A weak local presence
The Google Business Profile lacked reviews, and the name, address and phone details were inconsistent across the web, which quietly undermines local rankings.
04
No story in the market
To win, Affiliated needed to read as a community leader. That called for content and PR that was national, relevant and hyper-local all at once.
the campaign
What we did about it
Four workstreams, run together over the life of the campaign.
Content calendar
We built a calendar around low-competition local opportunities: the best neighbourhoods to live in Rapid City, Billings and Scottsdale. Alongside it we covered the national questions buyers actually search, like what credit score you need for a mortgage and how to buy a home.
Keyword research & sitemap
We created a sitemap and mapped every new keyword onto it, then rewrote landing pages like new home purchase and home refinance around them, including page content, titles and meta descriptions.
Content audit
We rewrote the blogs and landing pages to kill the duplication and keyword cannibalization, and stripped thin, trafficless pages out of both the site and Google's index.
the proof
Straight from Google
Not dashboards of our own making. These are Google's own reports.
Search Console
Clicks and impressions climbing steadily as the new content and technical work compounded, ending with a regional lender outranking Quicken Loans on its own turf in Rapid City.