From brand-only rankings to a compounding organic channel
- Lender type
- RBI-registered NBFC, direct lending
- Book size
- ₹640 Cr AUM at engagement start
- Ticket size
- ₹50k – ₹5L, 12–48 month tenure
- Engagement
- Oct 2024 – Jul 2025 (10 months, ongoing)
Starting position
The lender ranked for its own name and almost nothing else. 91% of applications came from Google and Meta paid, and blended cost per approved application had risen from ₹1,410 to ₹2,060 across four quarters as competitors bid up the same keywords.
Baseline measured over Jul–Sep 2024 in the client's own GA4 property and LOS export, before any work started.
Measurement stack
- GA4
- Google Search Console
- Google Ads
- Looker Studio
- In-house LOS export
What we did, in order
Month 1
Crawl and log-file audit: 3,100 of 4,700 URLs were parameter duplicates; the application funnel was blocked from indexing by a legacy robots rule.
Months 2–4
Technical rebuild — canonical and indexation fixes, LoanOrCredit and FAQ schema, LCP on the apply flow cut from 4.8s to 1.9s on 4G.
Months 3–7
42 bilingual intent pages published against eligibility, documentation, interest-rate and city queries, reviewed by the client's compliance lead before publishing.
Months 5–10
EMI and eligibility calculators shipped as indexable pages, and paid rebuilt to stop bidding on the 61 queries organic now held in the top three.
Baseline vs. current
| Metric | Baseline | Current | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-brand organic sessions / month | 8,240 | 23,390 | +184% |
| Approved applications / month | 312 | 487 | +56% |
| Blended cost per approved application | ₹2,060 | ₹1,421 | −31% |
| Organic share of approved applications | 9% | 34% | 2.4× |
| Monthly media spend | ₹6.4L | ₹6.1L | −5% |
Metric notes & assumptions
- [1]Non-brand organic sessions from Google Search Console and GA4, averaged over the last three months of the period (May–Jul 2025) against the Jul–Sep 2024 baseline average. Brand-term exclusion regex was agreed with the client and unchanged throughout.
- [2]Approvals are credit-approved applications recorded in the client's loan origination system, deduplicated by PAN, excluding re-applications within 30 days. Disbursal counts run roughly 8–11% lower and are reported separately in the monthly dashboard.
- [3]Blended cost = (paid media spend + our monthly fee) ÷ total approved applications from all channels. Because organic approvals carry no media cost, this figure falls as organic share grows; a paid-only CPA over the same window moved from ₹2,060 to ₹1,884.
- [4]Attribution is GA4 last non-direct click for the digital funnel, reconciled each month against the LOS source field. Roughly 6% of approvals could not be attributed to a channel and are excluded from the share calculation, not from the totals.
- [5]Media spend is invoiced spend excluding GST. Spend was deliberately held roughly flat so that the change in cost per approval reflects funnel and channel-mix work rather than budget change.
+184%
Non-brand organic sessions in 10 months
−31%
Blended cost per approved application
2.4×
Organic share of approvals
Evidence & artifacts (NDA-safe)
Shown on a call, sanitised — never published with client identifiers
Month-1 technical audit (sanitised extract)
What it measures: 4,700 crawled URLs, duplicate-parameter clusters, robots and canonical conflicts, and the indexation status of every funnel step.
Sanitisation: Client domain, internal URLs and staff names removed; issue counts intact.
Looker Studio dashboard (demo clone)
What it measures: Approvals, blended cost per approval, channel contribution and funnel-stage conversion, on the same layout the client sees.
Sanitisation: Live clone shown on a call with dummied labels; no client data exported.
Search Console export, non-brand queries
What it measures: Query-level clicks, impressions and average position for the 61 queries that reached the top three.
Sanitisation: Brand-containing queries stripped; date ranges shown in full.
Baseline vs. current reconciliation sheet
What it measures: GA4 sessions and conversions lined up against LOS approvals month by month, with the unattributed remainder shown.
Sanitisation: Borrower-level rows removed; monthly aggregates only.
What didn't work
Two of the three long-form comparison hubs never ranked — the SERP was owned by aggregators with far stronger link profiles. We stopped that cluster in month 6 and moved the budget into calculators and city pages, which is where the compounding actually came from.
"The first month was mostly them telling us what was broken in our own site, which was uncomfortable and correct. What changed my mind was the monthly report reconciling against our LOS numbers instead of an ad dashboard."