Overview
First Rate Mortgages are a professional mortgage brokering firm who help people with their home loans, investment property, refinances, and equity releases.
“You can’t always bank on your bank!”
First Rate Mortgages help ensure their clients have the best financial advice and customised mortgage for their situation. They are committed to respecting and valuing their clients. Their team provides a focused and personalised experience facilitating a premium service for their clients mortgage needs.
The Challenge
After working with multiple digital marketing agencies, spending thousands of dollars and receiving second-rate results. First Rate Mortgages were just about fed up with marketers and ready to give up, due to these negative experiences.
In their words they said to us “you are our last hope”.
When we first met them, they were struggling to compete in the market. After spending so much money with other agencies, they were still not ranking organically on Google for the keywords they wanted and missing out on lots of potential business. What was worse is they were ranking for keywords that were bringing the wrong customers through the door in spite of being clear that they did not want to rank for them.
Furthermore, their Google Ads were not optimised, so their marketing budget was being spent on irrelevant inquiries. After further investigation we found out that the targeting was set to the wrong audience.
Their website was also riddled with security and plugin problems, did not provide good user experience and was receiving spam.
Creative Website Design
As First Rate Mortgages did not have the best experience with digital marketing agencies, our goal was to build trust and work together to achieve their goals. We started with an audit of their digital assets to identify where the issue was. We were transparent and showed them all the information that came up in the audit and they were able to verify it.
Marketing Plan:
First, we created a clear marketing plan to tackle the issues and address the ones that would make the biggest impact early on.
This turned out to be beneficial for both parties as we clearly defined what needed to be done and found out some crucial information that helped the strategy, we built for First Rate Mortgages.
Website Design:
Next, we analysed their current website and what previous agencies had done, to assess the damage and see what needed fixing and improvement.
For their website, we first fixed the backend, bugs and plugins, fixing the critical issues that were causing elements to break. Next, we changed their website forms to improve security and decrease spam. We also worked on improving the website and content through uploading high-quality and relevant images that load fast.
SEO
For SEO, we conducted exhaustive keyword research and identified the ones that would bring in the right traffic. We then went on to completely rewrite the SEO in the backend and correct the wrong signals that were being sent.
We also worked with the team on their content strategy to improve their content on the website. This significantly improved the quality of traffic and in turn helped bring in the right customers. The next step was to work on the Google ads.
Google Ads
We first reviewed their entire account and then made critical changes to their current campaigns to target the correct audiences. We also improved their campaign structure, ad copy, keyword selection and added a negative keyword list (so the ads were not triggered for searches they did not want). This significantly improved the quality of ads and slowly started bringing in the right customers.
The highlight of this project for us was seeing the business’s sales revive within 2 months of engaging us to help with their marketing. The leads started to flow through the ads, then through organic as the website was converting prospects into qualified leads.
Client Testimonial
Many agencies talk the talk, then make excuses for poor performance and want more money. Business Refinery explain things well, do what they say they will do and show evidence of this with a monthly review and goals for the next month. They are now working on our Adwords and we are confident that this will be at the same high service level.
Ready to start your next project with us?
Work with experts that will listen to your marketing problems and help solve them.