How a top credit union increased home loan form submissions by 2000%
50%
increase
in organic website sessions (YoY)
2000%
increase
in home loan form submissions
290%
increase
in conversions
Company Overview
Among credit unions, Kinecta Federal Credit Union (Kinecta) is among America’s largest and most influential. The company services more than 245,000 member-owners and more than $4.7 billion in assets. Comprising more than 700 employees, 190 employer groups, and 22 branches, Kinecta operates in a competitive and crowded digital marketplace.
Very competitive, in fact. This is why Kinecta was so interested in improving organic and paid search visibility online. In doing so, Kinecta aimed to drive traffic and business in geographically targeted markets for both website and on-site products.
Over the course of a single year (2020), the digital marketing strategy that Atlantic developed, helped drive large increases in paid search mortgage activity through clicks, impressions, and conversions. From an organic search perspective, Kinecta saw tremendous year-over-year gains in organic sessions, new users, and conversions.
Solutions
Atlantic helped Kinecta launch an aggressive “online visibility” initiative centered around two focus areas: paid search and organic search engine optimization (SEO). At a high level, both had the goal of not only getting more eyes on Kinecta products, but also converting that heightened digital presence into new mortgages, credit cards, automobile loans, business financing, and checking accounts.
SEO Strategy
Implement Technical and On-page SEO Best Practices
With a considerable search presence already, Kinecta had a prime opportunity to take its organic SEO game to the next level. To get there, Atlantic focused on cleaning up the website’s technical and on-page SEO, including load speeds, site metadata, and content consolidation/organization.
Optimize for Local Search
Ranking for local search queries is an essential component of Kinecta’s overall strategy, but they needed to get their digital house in order. Atlantic cleaned up 20 of Kinecta’s location-specific citations, which are crucial for securing top local search rankings. In the period of the partnership, we were able to improve their overall sessions by 50% year over year, while also seeing an increase in conversions of 290%. Throughout 2020 we saw improvements of 55% in organic search sessions and an increase of roughly 2000% for home loan form submissions.
Paid Search Strategy
As with any credit union, new product applications are a core part of revenue generation and growth. To help meet Kinecta’s monthly goals for new applications of featured products, Atlantic created, launched, tested, and managed a series of paid search campaigns. Atlantic worked with the Kinecta team to integrate quality tracking for these campaigns across their original site and Kinecta’s new site that launched mid-2020.
Our core focus for paid search was to capture searches of current and potential members by supplementing the campaigns with brand terms while placing a primary focus on mortgage, credit cards, auto, business, and checking accounts. We linked each of these campaigns to dedicated landing pages, each one optimized to increase conversions for these target audiences.
Over the entirety of 2020, these new paid search campaigns created 6,850 conversions, for Kinecta, at a relatively low cost per conversion ($18.84). During this same time frame, the mortgage campaign produced 274 conversions at a similarly low cost-per-click ($2.94). Overall, this paid search strategy generated a 36% increase in mortgage conversions alongside a 120% increase in click-thru-rate.
Outcomes
Across the board, Atlantic’s paid search and organic SEO strategies helped Kinecta drastically improve its digital presence. Far beyond vanity metrics, however, these campaigns and tactics created the kind of bottom line results that a leading credit union should expect: website traffic, form submissions, and more leads for featured products (mortgage, credit cards, and so on).
Today, Kinecta is poised to build on this solid search foundation by building out highly targeted content, landing pages, and paid search campaigns. As the credit union’s domain authority continues to strengthen, more keyword rankings, high-quality backlinks, and engagement ought to keep Kinecta highly visible—and highly competitive—in local organic search.
50%
increase
in organic website sessions (YoY)
2000%
increase
in home loan form submissions
290%
increase
in conversions