Globally banking is digitizing. Industries like gold loan require physical interactions. And thus have their unique challenges.
At indiagold, our primary offering is doorstep gold loan service. Over 2021-23, I led digital growth at indiagold.co, an Indian startup funded by top global investors.
Leading digital growth primarily meant scaling indiagold’s SEO and performance marketing to drive gold loan disbursals.
Choosing Product led SEO
“Necessity is the mother of invention”
– Plato
Starting May 2022, RBI, India’s central bank began hiking repo rates. This meant that days of easy availability of capital were over. There were murmurs of an oncoming startup funding winter.
At indiagold, we needed to rethink lowering digital customer acquisition costs (CAC). Up until then, performance marketing, especially Google Search text ads had been our primary digital customer acquisition channel.
SEO was another promising, scalable growth channel that could have led to low CAC, but we had not invested in SEO till then.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
– Chinese Proverb
We knew the same is true for SEO. So we decided to invest in a low cost, low risk manner. We did not plan to allocate large budgets to hiring SEO experts or investing heavily in PR to build Domain Authority, till we had done some groundwork.
A new radical approach => Drive SEO Growth like a Product leader, and win non-linearly.
indiagold SEO Snapshot Oct 2022
- Domain Rating (DR): 31
- Traffic: 3,000 / month
- Pages: ~30
- Keywords: ~100
- Backlinks: 5K
Case in Point: Product led SEO at indiagold
Traditionally, driving business metrics from SEO hinges on creating long-form content and link building.
Product led SEO pivots towards a customer-centric, non-linear approach.
We researched how we could fulfill user search intent programmatically.
This began by looking for patterns in the keyword and content themes that lead to the best conversion funnels in paid ads.
We created a product roadmap with 10 tools, out of which 3 scaled fantastically well, generating high intent leads.
I share my process for building an Easy Product led SEO Roadmap here.
The Process
Building a high quality roadmap requires iterations.
We deepened our knowledge of the consumer behavior on Google search.
We added more
- Products
- Utilities within products
Then we started looking for the ones that showed the highest CTR and revenue conversion. These were are high potential pages.
We created high quality mass personalized content with GPT4 to improve positions for these high potential pages.
While Google penalises use of AI to spam, it doesn’t penalise creating value for users at high speed and scale.
Some of the most successful tools published were:
- {{competitor bank}} Gold Loan Interest Rate (Comparison Pages)
- {{competitor brand}} Branch Locator
- Gold Rate Today in {{City}}
We went from 3,000 visitors in Sep’22 to 300,000+ in Aug’23.
All with the help of 1 ambitious engineer and 1 growth intern. While generating 2000+ high intent leads.
indiagold’s organic traffic was 315k+ visitors / month as of Jan 2024.
And that’s a short summary of how indiagold used Product led SEO to capture demand at scale.
indiagold SEO Snapshot Jan 2024
- Domain Rating (DR): 33
- Traffic: 315,000 / month
- Pages: ~7k
- Keywords: ~53k
- Backlinks: 7K
Before You Go
Product led SEO is a powerful growth channel.
Make sure you don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Strike the right balance of building and learning to make meaningful strides in getting results.
I can give you my perspective on any questions you have on organic user growth via Product led SEO.
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