AmeriFirst Home Mortgage has provided home loans for three decades throughout the Midwest and the South. Headquartered in Portage, Michigan, the company focuses on developing relationships with its clients to provide them with the right loans for their situations.
The Challenge: Help the Website Catch Up to the Blog
In the past few years, AmeriFirst began a heavy inbound marketing program, using its blog as a foundation. The blog was so successful that the company wanted to revamp the rest of its website, which was a legacy website that did not perform either on an organic SEO level or from a conversion perspective or user experience perspective, compared to the blog’s performance. In other words, the blog was moving forward, but the rest of the site was not keeping up.
The Solution: ClearPivot SEO Audit and HubSpot Web Development
AmeriFirst’s blog is built on HubSpot, so the next natural step was to find a HubSpot partner to help build a better-performing website. That HubSpot partner turned out to be ClearPivot. AmeriFirst and ClearPivot engaged in a discovery session to walk through the mortgage lender’s specific needs and evaluate what was working and what wasn’t for the company. After ClearPivot scoped out the project, AmeriFirst decided that it was exactly what the company needed, and ClearPivot got to work on an SEO audit and web development.
The SEO audit was the research phase. ClearPivot looked at both on-page and off-page factors, like content relevancy, citations from external websites, and coding and technical issues. ClearPivot then built out a content roadmap that detailed the recommended structure of the website and page content, including headlines, titles, URLs, page redirects and other factors. Finally, as part of the SEO audit, ClearPivot conducted four hours of client training on the findings to ensure that AmeriFirst would be able to continue the process going forward.
Next up was the HubSpot web development. AmeriFirst’s website underwent a complete visual redesign, as well as getting a restructured site map, page layout, and interface. ClearPivot redeveloped the new site from the old legacy content management to a new site on HubSpot, adding responsive design so that users on smartphones and tablets would be able to view the site as easily as users on desktop computers.
The Result: 175% Increase in Leads from Organic Search Traffic
The new AmeriFirst website launched in October 2013. Over the next five months, the company watched its organic search traffic increase by 270 percent compared to the five months prior to the launch. The lead generation statistics were also impressive: ClearPivot’s HubSpot web development had resulted in a 175 percent increase in lead generation from organic search five months after launch, compared to the five months prior.
Key Stats
- 270% increase in organic search traffic
- 175% increase in lead generation from organic search
The AmeriFirst team was thrilled with the results – and the process. "Chris, Laura, Ryan, and the entire team at ClearPivot were a pleasure to work with. From our SEO audit and SWOT analysis through the completion of design and website implementation, our project ran smoothly,” said Dan Moyle, AmeriFirst’s Director of Marketing. “As a company who understands the HubSpot philosophy and inbound marketing, it was refreshing to work with a company with the same knowledge. ClearPivot saw that we ‘get it’ and helped us take it all to the next level. Well worth the investment."
