1. Fast B2B Organic Traffic Growth in Competitive CRE Financing Segment
Using low-difficulty keywords to jumpstart growth and enable us to rank for more competitive words
Client brief
In late 2023, Duckfund announced that it would stop offering its SME funding product and focus only on building business with its CRE soft deposit financing product. We needed to build relevant, valuable traffic in this highly competitive segment.
Strategy
Identify ‘low-hanging fruit’ keywords to easily rank for ideas that would be relevant to our target market — CRE investors and property flippers — as well as make it easier to rank for our main product and its variable keywords, namely ‘soft deposit financing’, ‘earnest money deposits,’ and ‘gator lending’.
All blogs were supported by backlink building and guest posting campaigns, especially to rank for competitive words like ‘how much is commercial land worth.’
Results
Within six months, Duckfund had increased organic traffic by 300% (4x), from about 800 visits/month in late 2023 to over 3,000 visits/month by May 2024.
As of June 2024, Duckfund ranked Top 3 for 18 blog posts linked to targeted keywords, including #1 rankings for valuable ideas such as ‘how much is commercial land worth’ and ‘how to flip commercial property.’
The site was partially able to grow so rapidly through a campaign targeting localized keywords per state, such as ‘how much earnest money is required in illinois.’ These keywords were less competitive and allowed us to build up easy traffic and establish a Topic Authority to help rank for more difficult ideas.
The Duckfund article ranking #1 for the difficult keyword ‘how much is commercial land worth’ can be found here: https://www.duckfund.com/blogs-re/how-much-is-commercial-land-worth
It provides a good example of how journalistic-quality research and graphs/charts can help rank #1 for competitive terms.
As of June 2024, Duckfund also ranked #1 for ‘what is gator lending’ (with a featured snippet) and ‘soft deposit financing.’ (See screenshots below and in the following section for ‘soft deposit financing’)
2. Organic B2B Conversions with Blog Posts
Generating business with high buyer intent ideas
Client brief
We had jumpstarted organic traffic, which was now by far Duckfund’s top traffic source. Next Duckfund wanted to ensure we were optimizing for Bottom of the Funnel conversions.
Strategy
Identify high buyer intent ideas within our industry that we can rank Top 3 and generate Bottom of the Funnel organic traffic.
This included writing product-specific blogs around the ideas of earnest money and soft deposits for CRE.
Results
Duckfund ranked #1 in the US for two top transactional keywords (product-specific keywords) — ‘soft deposit financing’ and ‘sign now pay later.’
We also ranked #2 in the US for other buyer-focused ideas that specifically address top challenges for CRE developers, including ‘how to buy/finance commercial property with no money down’. This keyword is incredibly valuable for Duckfund because their product helps CRE investors do just that.
As a result, that article is now the top-converting blog on Duckfund’s site, bringing in 14 B2B customers (defined as successful sign ups) the first two quarters. This is considered a lot in an industry where customers are commonly looking to get financing for between $50,000 and $1 million, per property.
Overall, the site’s organic traffic brought in over 70 B2B customers during that period, meaning that this one post represented 20% of the total sales.
That Duckfund blog post can be found here: http://www.duckfund.com/blogs-re/how-to-buy-commercial-property-with-no-money-down
