SEO Analysis – Money Lenders Singapore

Here we are going to take a look into another industry, in finance, which is Money Lenders Singapore.

What we are looking for is to analyse the organic search result and to analyse the top three results and see why they’re ranking so well.

First of all, let’s take a look at the keyword money lenders Singapore using Ahrefs.

It has a search volume of 400 and it’s very difficult to rank up in Singapore. It has a KD (keyword difficulty) of 67. So usually, when I do SEO, I try to look for keywords below KD=20. My maximum is usually 30. Beyond that, it’s a really long battle in SEO and it will take a lot of time to rank up.

You can see here that this is a very competitive keyword.

After they do a search, 53% of the users actually click on the search results.

So it can either be on the Google Ad word or google my business or even the organic search results.

This 75% are clicking on the organic results, and 25% click on what we call the SEM results.

So we take a look at whole search result. We can see that for example fastcashpersonalloan.com.

For this particular website, the top keyword is actually licensed money lender. And they have over backlinks. For the traffic, they are generating around 1800 per month.

Backlinks are actually links that can be point to your website. That means, if your friend has a website, you can actually interlink with each other.

This one is followed by Cash Mart as second, which has backlinks of more than 14,000. It’s generating traffic of around 500 per month and is currently ranking for 158 keywords in organic search, with their top keyword is also licensed money lender.

The third top result is a government site, which we can’t use for this analysis.

Let’s move on to Credit 21, which takes the fifth spot, according to Ahrefs. According to the report, it has 47,801 backlinks and is currently ranking for about 124 keywords. Its top keyword is also licensed money lender.

As you can notice, Credit 21 has more backlinks than the other two we mentioned. This tells us that having the highest backlinks alone will not guarantee that you rank on top. There’s a lot of other factors or criteria like on-page SEO, quality of your backlinks, etc.

Moneylenders Singapore – SEM Analysis

Now let’s take a look at the SEM results of this particular keyword.

As you can see, it currently costs $13 per click.

So when we look at money lenders Singapore, we know that these three are usually the SEM result.

They are paying for $13 per click.

Let’s say if you have a budget of $1000 per month, you can actually run an SEO campaign and you are expecting about one click is about $13.

Money Lenders Singapore Google My Business Listing Analysis

Then followed by google my business listing.

It features one Google Ad followed by the results such as Cash Mart, Credit Matters, and Katong Credit.

Then followed by the organic results with Cash Mart, Credit 21, 1APCapital as top ranking pages.

The results are a little bit different from the Ahrefs report because this they actually grab the results from the servers and this one is grabbing the results using my computer and using my IP address.

Let’s take a look at the Google My Business.

You can see that there are a lot of reviews, 123, which is a lot. There are some photos but they can do better. I think the reason why they have so may reviews is the fact that a lot of it is rated 1 star.

If you have a Google My Business Listing, what you can do is ask your customers after they’ve purchased your product or hired your services to leave reviews. There will be a mixture of good and bad reviews. That’s totally normal. The feedback is not always good if you’re running a business.

The category of this listing is “loan agency in Singapore”. That’s correct. You always have to check if you’ve selected the right category for your business because it will be impossible to rank up with the keywords that you’re targeting if otherwise.

Let’s take a look at credit matters. It has five reviews, which is not so good. You’d want to try to aim for at 10. Another thing to remember is, if you are going to ask a customer to leave a review, make sure to tell them to write at least 2-3 sentences. Leaving only stars may look spammy.

Credit Matters is also under the correct category, which is loan agency in Singapore. They actually inserted the keyword beside name, same with Cash Mart.

It’s not a good idea all the time because the algorithm gives a lot more credits to factors other than the keywords. But if you want, you can do the same and see if it will work for you as well.

The next is Katong.

It has 59 reviews. Again, it’s not enough that you have more reviews to rank on top. It also depends on what kind of reviews and citation. Citation means that your business name, address and telephone number are being embedded in different business directories so that you can actually rank on top. Katong’s category is still loan agency in Singapore. Looking at the photos, I can say that most of them are stock photos. Although this is okay, it would be better to upload your own photos.

Examining these results tells us a number of things. First, if you want to rank up for this particular industry, you have to make sure that you have your business name, which you can followed by relevant keywords. Getting more reviews and photos can also give your business an edge. One thing that most people overlook, however, are videos. If you have them, they’d really boost your ranking. Don’t forget to add the correct category as well and other business info such as operation hours.

Money Lenders Singapore Organic Search Results

It’s time to check the organic search results. Below the business listing, we see the organic results ranking for the keywords we keyed in.

Upon opening, we found out that the first result is not an actual money lender. The particular page is a listing of different companies. So we know that they’re a site that features businesses. Even if they’re not among your competitors, you might still want to check how they’re ranking.

Singapore Fast Cash Personal Loan

Singaporefastcashpersonalloan has over 12000 backlinks, and it looks like they acquire 500-1000 of it per month. For the organic keywords, this site is ranking for around 1800. If you check out their organic traffic over the years, you can see that they are improving.

We can tell that they must be doing something right, or else we will not see a big jump here. Their top organic keywords are licensed money lender, insurance companies in Singapore, moneylender. Now, let’s check their backlinks. Let’s set it to descending DR to see the backlink with the highest domain ratings first.

We can see here that they have links from Google, Scoop, and Instapaper. But they also have a lot of foreign links. That tells us that they must be spending a lot. So what they basically do is they acquire more backlinks to beat their competitors. So they spam the website with foreign names. I consider this method junk but if you want to try, you can do so. It worked for them so maybe it will work for you as well.

Let’s move on to the next result, Cashmart.

Cash Mart

It has more than 20,000 backlinks, they’re ranking for more than 7,000 organic keywords. I can totally say that they’ve done so well on their SEO campaign, seeing how their organic traffic shoot up by a lot this year.

Their top keywords are sgcarmart, posb, one motoring, uob gold price, and sg car mart. Let’s take a look at their top pages.

I’m not sure why they’re ranking for this topic. Maybe they have some business with OCBC banking. Checking out their homepage, I think they’re acting some sort of middleman. But all in all, I can say that their website is very well done. There’s a lot of content. They have good images. Calls-to-action are on point. There are also testimonials and a lot of icons, which is ideal.

Now, let’s jump to their backlinks. Again, let’s check the ones with high DR.

We can see the same scenario here. They’re also using the same strategy. They spam a lot of link, aiming to see a steady upward result. You can do that too but take note that you might get a penalty from Google. It’s actually a gamble. But as you can see, it worked for them. So it’s up to you whether you want quality links, or you’d spam like what they did here.

Now, let’s have the next result, Credit21, which I think is the only website currently ranking on top that is an actual licensed money lender.

Credit21

It has more than 69,000 backlinks and around 2000 keywords. The performance in their organic traffic is actually the same with the other two we’ve examined. They shoot up by a lot for the past few months. By looking at their top 5 keywords, we can say that they’re doing very aggressive SEO in order to secure their ranking.

The rationale behind why they’re doing so aggressive in SEO is they already have a good grasp of the whole industry. Let’s say you are paying $13 per one click to Google Adwords. With that, the monthly cost would be around $4000 – $5000. It would be good sense to think that instead of paying 4-5K to Google, why not spend this money on SEO to secure long term benefits? Consider that with PPC, you’d be constantly paying to get traffic. Whereas with an aggressive SEO approach, once you rank up, you’d have unlimited traffic that will not base on paid clicks.

Of course, it’s hard to tell what exact business model they’re using. But I know that once they reach the SERPs’ page one, they can get about a hundred visitors per month or even per day. And once they start converting those visitors to customers, they’d be earning thousands of dollars.

Let’s check out their backlinks.

It’s actually the same spamming strategy. A lot of black hat links, some are PBN. So many links are in foreign languages. What they do is they sell out a website and create a lot of content. They do their on-page SEO. They also make sure their website looks credible. They keep spamming a lot of links to pages, so they can rank up on top.  When it comes to how much they’re spending, I’m not so sure. It could be within the range of $1000 – $5000.

Money Lenders Singapore Summary

If you are new to this industry, this analysis tells you a thing or two about how to rank up. I suggest that you don’t go for SEO first. Try to get into SEM initially to gain some traffic. Once you pick up some business, pump the traffic back through SEO as a longer-term solution. The three websites we’ve analysed previously must have been there for a long time. The good thing about their backlinks strategy is they create a lot of links, spam them, and acquire a great number of backlinks. However, the amount of link loss is also a lot. So important to maintain the velocity to fight with your competitors.

That’s all for this topic’s analysis. If you have any questions about this industry, drop me an email or a message. I will get back to you. Thank you!