Setting the foundations for national growth.

Where it started

Aaron had built something credible and trusted, and business owners who found Finance Link valued it. But the business was one person, with little to no following and no marketing strategy. To grow, he needed people to buy into the idea: business owners looking for funding help, and later the regional partners who would take the model into new areas.

Shaping the approach

• Who it serves. A clear picture of the business owners Finance Link helps and the situations that bring them to it.
• How it presents itself. Positioning and messaging that explain a complex service simply and build trust before the first conversation.
• The opportunity for partners. How to frame Finance Link for potential regional franchise partners, which shaped the move into a franchise model.
• An approach Aaron can run. A marketing approach built so the business can keep running it day to day, with support where it adds the most.

Making search the main source of enquiries

With the foundations in place, the focus moved to being found by business owners at the moment they need help. Organic search played a small part in bringing in new business. The site drew 865 organic sessions between April and September 2025, ranked for 74 keywords with none in the top three, and had little presence for the searches buyers make when they're close to a decision. Paid search was doing the heavy lifting online.

What we did

Technical work kept the site healthy enough to rank: the sitemap, robots file, Core Web Vitals, metadata and error pages were all fixed. The growth came from four other areas.

1. Research built around buyer intent. Keywords grouped by what the buyer is trying to solve and how close they are to a decision, with priority on searches that lead to enquiries.
2. New pages for gaps buyers were searching. The audit showed specific buyer situations with no matching page. Dedicated service pages were written for each one.
3. Existing pages rewritten to rank and convert. Service pages restructured in plain language around the questions buyers ask, with metadata and headings matched to target searches.
4. Visibility in AI search. Structured data, FAQ content and answer-style copy that ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews can cite.

The results

Organic search now brings in two out of every three enquiries, and visitors from search convert at a higher rate than a year ago. April to September 2026, compared with the same period in 2025.

Every month in the period was up on the same month the year before, with organic sessions rising from 865 to 1,511. Paid search was paused in 2026, and total enquiries across the site were lower than 2025 as a result. Organic and AI search were the channels that grew.

Where the movement happened

• Three high-intent buying searches for the core service: from not ranking to #1
• The core service category term: from #35 (page four) to #3
• The highest-volume research search in the niche: from not ranking to #6
• Location-based provider searches: from not ranking to #4

AI assistant visits are still a small channel, but 15.6% of them led to an enquiry, the highest rate of any channel on the site.

Sources: GA4 (organic sessions and key events by channel, April to September 2025 and 2026), SEMrush (keyword rankings), Screaming Frog (technical crawl).