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Home » Niche Marketing » Personal finance writing » Payday loan marketing

Investing in the latest online payday loan marketing techniques in a time of increased competition and regulation

Payday loan marketing techniques are changing constantly as companies try to protect themselves against future action by either regulators or search engines.

The Google “ban” on payday loan and HCSTC advertising only really applied in North America and on loan products with an APR of greater than 36%.

However, this is no reason for complacency.

Google has demonstrated on many occasions that it has happy to permanently or temporarily restrict PPC advertising when put under enough political or consumer pressure to do so.

For example, global music, theatre, and sports ticket reseller Viagogo’s adverts were banned from the platform and, as a result, visitors to their UK site plunged by 80% (worldwide, the fall was two-thirds).

Now collapsed previous market leader, Wonga, saw the writing on the wall early on and it benefited from heavy investment in content marketing.

As a result, when the potential worldwide ban on payday loan PPC advertising was announced, the impact on Wonga would have been minimal as 99.1% of its traffic came from organic searches (that is, the natural search results underneath the adverts on a Google search page).

Protect your major source of leads and enquiries by investing as much as possible of your advertising budget on internet content which finishes at or near the top of natiral search results.

Our payday loan marketing services

We offer a wide range of online and SEO marketing strategies for payday loan companies including:

You can find more detail on each service we offer together with our approach to writing for HCSTC companies on this page.

Find out more

If you’re in a hurry and you’d prefer to speak to an account manager about our services, please call our personal finance writing team on 0330 010 3495 or click here to email us.

We have extensive samples on all types of writing that we’re very happy to send you.

The longer-term savings achieved by investing in payday loan marketing and copywriting services

Benefit from higher, organic search engine rankings

Article publishing is the rising tide that lifts all boats because regular quality blog uploading increases the authority and relevance of your entire site and every page on it in Google’s eyes

  • Up to 80% clickthrough on non-paid for results first – be seen by more borrowers
  • Blogs with a substantial volume of high quality content benefit from far more inbound links
  • Google 434% more likely to index your whole site with a growing library of content
  • Re-use in your social media content

Much lower marketing costs with less PPC reliance

With PPC ads cost £4 per click, you need a big fortune to make a small profit in HCSTC. High-quality articles means much lower long-term spending on PPC campaigns.

  • Be found on the search terms visitors actually use when looking for a loan
  • Use every article as an opportunity to inform, reach out, and demonstrate compliance
  • Once you have paid for an article, no more to pay
  • Predictable monthly costs with fixed-price article writing and marketing packages

All content produced is compliant with regulation

The copywriters at More Than Words have produced 1,000s of pieces of content for HCSTC companies fully compliant with FCA CONC 3

  • We work to our own in-house writing guidelines in addition to CONC3
  • Our guidelines used in conjunction with yours
  • Articles proofed twice prior to submission to you
  • We keep up to date with latest regulatory trends

A friendly voice and persona for your company

Inclusive, sympathetic, understanding, plain English text giving your company a warm, friendly, approachable voice

  • Full, easy-to-follow explanation of products
  • In-depth copywriting answering clients’ questions
  • Helpful tips and techniques on budgeting
  • Position your company as being on the side of borrowers

Build your own library of high-quality, response-generating payday loan articles to consolidate and improve on your current organic rankings

Since our founding in 2016, More Than Words has worked with dozens of HCSTC lenders and brokers on their content marketing.

Every single one of the lenders and brokers we have worked with were seeking:

  • protection from harm caused by future PPC bans,
  • higher natural search engine rankings for their websites, and
  • a reduction in customer acquisition costs as they shifted away gradually from paid-for advertising.

Seven of the most successful examples of payday loan company blogs are:

These companies post regular, high-quality, keyword-rich content on their websites.

The articles they publish are of such a high standard and to such a frequency that Google regularly re-indexes their sites.

With each re-index, Google records the addition of further quality content and it upranks its assessment of each website’s authority, relevance, and credibility.

Improving your site’s credibility and authority with high-quality, response-driven articles – how does it work?

There are millions of searches carried out every year for payday loans, short-term loans, and other types of bad credit finance.

However, not every potential client searches in the same way and this is to your benefit.

For example, competition for the most hotly-contested terms like “payday loans” and “bad credit loans” is very intense.

To have a chance of finishing on the first page of results for these terms, Google has to rate your website and its content incredibly highly.

How do you achieve such a higher rating?

The best way to start building your site’s credibility, authority, and relevance scores is by achieving top rankings on low-competition terms first.

These low-competition terms are searched for tens of thousands of times a month and it’s much easier to make sure that your your website is featured prominently for those terms.

As time goes on, start uploading articles for search queries where there is slightly more competition.

Allied with other SEO techniques you use, you can start seriously competing for terms like “payday loans” and “bad credit loans” within a few months.

You’ll get business in the mean time though.

For example, “unsecured loans with bad credit” is searched for 1,350 times a month with a low competition ranking of just 45% – a great search term.

There are hundreds of other valuable terms we can help you rank for with even less competition as we increase your site’s credibility, authority, and relevance scores with Google.

Quality, in-depth HCSTC articles written in plain English work answering questions that borrowers want the answers for

The other great benefit of building your library of articles at first using lesser-searched for keywords is that you’ll be concentrating your marketing efforts at someone much closer to making a decision to apply.

For example, someone searching for “bad credit loans no guarantor no credit check” (2,900 searches a month) has already started to narrow down the financial product they might apply to much more than someone searching for just “payday loans”.

For this type of borrower, the terms you need to be competing on should include…

  • “where to get a payday loan with bad credit”
  • “will payday loan contact employer”
  • “what payday loans are legit”
  • “business finance for vans”
  • “can payday loan companies come to your house”
  • “which payday loan approves everyone”
  • “are payday loans instant”

For short-term loans, we’d recommend you compete on these terms…

  • “do short term loans affect your credit rating”
  • “which short term loan company is best”
  • “how to get a short term loan with bad credit”
  • “are short term loans safe”
  • “short term loans without a guarantor”
  • “short term loans with bad credit uk”
  • “short term loans for the self-employed”

An action plan for your HCSTC/payday loan articles

Our goal when working for you is to make sure that the pages on which your visitors apply for a loan are seen by Google as the most important on your website.

Prior to commencing work for you, we build a long-term content plan for you to create articles which push your product pages as highly as possible.

In addition, we’ll ensure that the more obscure searches we write articles for also have the highest chance of achieving a Page 1 ranking.

Many of the HCSTC companies we work with have their own SEO manager – if yours does, we’re very happy to and experienced in working with client SEO managers and teams.

Each article we write on your behalf will:

  • feature both short- and long-tail keywords for greater Google comprehension
  • be 1,500 to 2,000 words long, the average length of articles which rank highest on search engines
  • link to the relevant product page on your site (for example, “payday loans”, “£300 short term loans”, and so on) so that Google knows that this is ultimately the page you want to feature on results pages.

Writing for your product pages

On their product pages, most of our HCSTC clients feature the first part of the application form above the fold.

When a client fills in their basic details on this page, they are then redirected to a page with a full application form.

On these product pages, there is usually a substantial body of text (up to 3,000 words in some cases) which explains the product in full.

This copy is, more often that not, included below the form.

We offer new and existing clients years of experience in writing for these types of pages and we’re very happy to send you samples if you’d like to see them.

Frequently asked questions about our payday loan marketing services

We would recommend a mixture of articles on the loans themselves together with articles on how to save and make money.

The HCSTC loan articles we’ll write for you will be detailed, plain English answers to the questions that would-be borrowers ask in Google.

Clients searching for answers to questions are more likely to be nearer to the point of making a positive decision to apply than clients searching for “payday loans”.

Each article follows a standard narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end with a strong call to action.

For non-HCSTC articles, the topics we write about will be on how to budget better, how to save money, and how to bring extra money into a household.

We have had years of experience across thousands of product pages and articles writing for HCSTC companies.

Over that time, we have devised our own internal guidelines on the rules we follow when writing articles for compliance to FCA CONC 3.

We are careful to strike the balance in promoting a product and getting the reader to ask themselves whether taking out an HCSTC loan is right for them.

We don’t write assertive statements and, where possible, we’ll externally link for verification and more information.

Our internal guidelines have been written to support and complement our clients’ internal guidelines.

HCTSC loan products have been subject to negative press attention and comment for well over a decade.

The portrayal of consumers who take out HCSTC products has not been much more favourable.

We fundamentally disagree with the demonisation of borrowers and it’s this agreement which underpins the tone of voice we used in our pieces.

4.5 million people take out HCSTC loans every year after a decade when prices have risen faster than wages. Borrowers juggle many different responsibilities and they hold down one or more jobs to meet these responsibilities.

In our text, we adopt a tone which is sympathetic to and understanding of borrowers’ needs and the pressures they are under.

We want the product pages and articles written in such a way that the customers feels that you are on their side.

 

Yes. The articles we write tend to be at least 1,500 words, often closer to 2,000 words.

The reason we write to this length is that, in test after test, the top 10 results for any search are dominated by articles of this length. However, we are aware that more people skim read articles than ever before.

We therefore break up a piece by using short paragraphs, descriptive sub-headlines, and imagery which supports the points of the text.

We can produce imagery to match your brand guidelines – please send those over and we’ll create up to 20 different templates to provide readers with visual variety in the graphics we use.

We write substantial product pages for HCSTC companies.

Our clients will generally use the copy we produce for product pages below the fold (so that the user has to scroll down for it).

In most cases, clients place an application form above the fold.

The style of writing we adopt for product pages is similar to the style we use for articles – informative, plain English, sympathetic, understanding, and clear.

With the copy on a product page, we aim to include as many relevant long-tail keywords as possible in accordance with generally accepted SEO practice for higher relevance and ranking positions.

 

Yes. We actively encourage client feedback and interaction through the entire process.

Given the highly technical nature of compliant HCSTC copy writing for both product pages and articles, it is not uncommon that, in the early days, there may be 3 or 4 revisions before you sign off an article or product page.

However, once our copywriters fully understand what it is that you want, production of content speeds up considerably requiring less of your time to proof work and to provide feedback.

We can design, write, and host a brand new website for you if you want one.

Because of the competition for high search-engine ranking in this sector, planning and executing a brand new website is a project which takes many months prior to launch followed by 6-12 months of supporting SEO work so that your new site ranks very highly on Google and on other search engines.

To contact us, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.

During your conversation with our account manager, let them know everything about you, your company, what your website is struggling to do at the moment, and what you’d like your website to do in 12 months’ time.

We’ll then create an action plan, fully costed and timetabled, which we’ll then send you for your consideration.

Other payday loan marketing services we offer

Money-saving and money-making articles

Most payday loan and HCSTC companies, in addition to providing detailed articles designed to answer searchers’ questions on their financial products, also upload money saving articles on how to budget better and how to bring more money into a household.

We have written thousands of articles in this genre ranging from how to save money at the supermarket to how to make money on the internet.

In addition to providing quality content for Google to index, these types of article promoting responsible spending are effective public relations material.

Guest posting service

Guest posting introduces your brand to a much wider audience and they can be used to link back to your product pages with our content distribution service.

Links from other sites, especially sites with high authority and credibility ratings, increase your own site’s authority and credibility ratings meaning a greater chance of high-placed search engine rankings for content and product pages across your site.

SEO plans

We’re able to analyse in-depth the content, structure, and other influential factors behind your competitors’ high search rankings.

In partnership with you, we’ll then devise a specific plan for your site based on your competitors’ metrics with the aim of getting as many of your product pages and articles as sustainably high as possible in the quickest time.

Ready for a time of increased regulator scrutiny?

Compared with the Financial Services Authority, the replacement Financial Conduct Authority is a much more active and interventionist regulator.

In the last twelve months, we have worked with many different HCSTC lenders to ready both their product pages and their articles for an era of even more intervention and a much tighter interpretation of the restrictions of FCA CONC 3.

Our handbook for enhanced HCSTC compliance

When working with clients in this sector, we have our own internal book of guidelines for writing for FCA CONC 3 compliance.

Many of our clients have their own written guidelines and, when planning article and product page writing for your site, we make sure that what we produce for you meets both your requirements and our internal specifications.

Payday loan marketing – samples available

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form and let us know what you want to achieve over the next 12 months for your company.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There’s lots of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk away from North Shields Metro station.

Find out more about our payday loan marketing service

Call us now to receive more info on 0330 010 3495, click here to email us, or fill out the form below.



    Payday loan marketing – interesting links and more information

    Payday loan marketing has been as controversial as HCSTC financial products for a long time.

    The FCA, at time of writing, look like they’re about to clamp down on car dealer advertising and finance commissions to a similar extent that they clamped down on the HCSTC market in recent years.

    With such an active regulator under seemingly constant political pressure, now is the time to consider whether the copy used on your website and elsewhere is truly compliant.

    We have compiled a list of interesting and related articles on FCA CONC 3 for your further reading:

    • The Biz of Lending – fantastic resources for companies in the HCSTC sector although many of the tactics described will need to be modified to be compliant with FCA CONC 3
    • Short term and payday loans – guidance from the UK Advertising Standards Authority
    • FCA CONC 3 – the full guidelines we work to when producing content for payday loan and bad credit loan companies
    • Financial Promotions Failings Loom Large – a report from the Consumer Credit Advisory Services about the FCA’s growing impatience at companies not adhering to CONC 3

    To start building a substantial library of search-engine-friendly, engaging, and actionable articles which are FCA CONC 3 compliant and which demonstrates strongly to borrowers that you are on their side, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or you can click here to email us.