Personal Loans Singapore – SEO Analysis

Here we’re going to take a look at the SEO industry analysis of personal loan Singapore. If you’re some kind of a licensed moneylender and you want to learn how to run a business that offers legal personal loans in Singapore, you’d want to take a look at the current state of organic results in this niche and what it takes to rank up on page one.

The first thing to do is examine the keyword “personal loan Singapore” in Ahrefs.

We know that in Singapore, it has a monthly search volume of 200. It generates 415 clicks, 21% of that is paid or generated through SEM. This is the first section that you usually see when you run a search on Google.

Meanwhile, 79% of those clicks are organic. This is what most people are after. They’re usually the results below the Google My Business results. As you can see above, the results for this particular query is dominated by a lot of banks that are offering loans.

Personal Loans Singapore Organic Search Result

Let’s now take a look at the top 10 results in Ahrefs.

The first one is MoneySmart, which is actually a finance blog. It takes the first and second result. It’s followed by SingSaver, DBS, TOC, etc. Most of these results belonging to the top ten results use personal loan Singapore as their top keyword.

Examining these results, we see that what MoneySmart did was quite brilliant.

First they inserted the keyword personal loan in their URL. For the next entry, they used somehow the same principal keyword (personal loans) followed by best personal loan Singapore. This way, they are actually hitting two birds with one stone.  If you’re going to ask me, what I think is Google treats the second page as a separate domain, not related whatsoever to the main website.

Another thing to note in this SERP is the one ranking in the 9^th place, a page from EasyCredit.

Putting [2020] is another SEO strategy. It’s quite smart because let’s say, I’m looking up information about personal loans. I don’t want to look at old search results. By putting the current year in your meta title, you are telling Google that you’ve updated this content. This page isn’t the only one using this technique. We also have the 4^th and the 1^st one utilising this.

As we have mentioned earlier, some of the clicks generated by this keyword came from SEM. This is the first part that you see in Google SERPs. While this portion is dominated by banks, the organic search results feature more finance websites. Another aspect in a Google SERP that’s worth noting is the Google My Business section.

Personal Loans Singapore Google My Business Analysis

The first result for Google My Business is Katong Credit.

Katong Credit

What they did right:

1. They inserted a keyword in their business name
2. They have a lot of Google reviews

We saw a lot of 1-star review. What I advise is you respond right away to these. It’s better to deal with the issue than ignore it.

If you’re asking your customers to give a review, don’t forget to mention that you’d appreciate it if they write something, even a 2-sentence review will do. As you can imagine, if they just rate you with stars and not leave any content, the reviews section will appear quite spammy.

3. They put the correct business category (Loan agency in Singapore)

They uploaded a number of photos but I think they can do better.

CreditMaster

CreditMaster is the second result we have for Google My Business. It’s a licensed moneylender. Just like Katong, they included the keyword in their business title and listed the company under the correct category. They have a considerable number of reviews with content, most of them good ones. As for the photos, there are a lot of them. All in all, this one is doing most it correctly.

Fast Money PTE Ltd

What immediately caught my attention were their reviews.

As you can see, they have more than 600 reviews and they average 4.9 in the 5-star rating, which is really impressive.  It’s possible that they’re buying reviews. I noticed a lot of funny names and 1-sentence content, but I can’t be sure. So far it’s okay. The business is listed under the correct category, loan agency in Singapore. However, they only have a few photos. So I think they can improve on this aspect.

Most of the results in Google My Business include the keyword in their name. If you want to rank up, you might want to do the same.

Now it’s time to take a look at the organic search results.

Personal Loans Singapore Website Analysis

Let’s take a look first at MoneySmart.

MoneySmart

As you can see, this page has around 171 backlinks and it’s ranking for quite a lot of keywords. It’s generating more than 6100 visitors per month.

Their organic search performance is still going up a little bit.

These are their top 5 keywords in Singapore:

The most impressive thing to note here is their top 5 pages, which are all target personal loans.

This what we call the silo strategy. It’s where you target a general keyword (personal loan), then you create other related content so you can have something like /personal-loan/ocbc or /personal-loan/hsbc-personal-loan, for example. These are what we call supporting pages and MoneySmart have utilised this technique so well.

Now, let’s take a look at their blog.

It has only 23 backlinks. Even though they have fewer backlinks, the page still managed to rank on top because of their high domain rating (DR). Added to that is the fact that the main website is generating a lot of traffic.

Their organic search results are dropping a little. As for the top keywords, they almost have the same with the previous page. If you’re running this kind of business, it would be wise to target the same keywords.

Let’s examine their backlinks now because I’m a little bit curious.

I’m actually quite impressed because they have backlinks from websites with very high domain rating. This means that high authority sites link back to this particular page. It would be a bit hard to beat them. One way is to try getting links from similar high authority sites.

SingSaver

Examining SingSaver, we know that they’re faring quite well too.

They have around 1500 backlinks and they generate about 4200 traffic per month.

They’re still going strong in terms of organic search performance.

Their top keywords are:

As you can see, they have new keywords here, renovation loan Singapore and education loan Singapore. They have decent search volume numbers. Therefore, you might want to rank with them as well.

The way they did their top 5 pages are same with the other MoneySmart page. They used another silo with good supporting pages.

Taking a look at their backlinks, this one has high-quality backlinks as well from several high authority sites like Yahoo! Finance and News, Herworld, SmartLocal, and many others.

Let’s say you are running a business offering personal loans. There are a number of options in order to rank up. Either you pay for SEM or you can rank for organic search results. You need to take note that the keyword difficulty is quite high. That means you may find it difficult to rank in the first page. What you can do is you can outreach to those that list personal loan businesses and see if they can include yours as well.

Another way you can rank up is to focus on Google My Business listing. I consider this a smart move since the SEM is dominated by banks the organic search results mostly feature finance blogs. This way, you can be featured in the Google My Business section of the SERP where your prospects can click to your website.

Personal Loans Singapore Summary

It can take about one to two years to rank up for this kind of campaign. From the way I see it, it’s very competitive especially that you are competing with banks and finance blogs. So you need to have a very aggressive SEO in order to rank up. If not, you can try out the Google My Business listing, get a lot of reviews, and upload a lot of photos and videos and see if you can be on the page one of the results.

If you have any questions, just drop me an email or you can use the content form and I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you!