Stay Finance Case Study | 4,166% Growth In Organic Leads

Stay Finance, an Australian-owned fintech lender helping everyday Australians access fast, responsible short-term personal loans, partnered with Clickmatix to turn a low-visibility website into a consistent, measurable source of qualified loan enquiries.

Industry

Finance & Fintech Lending

Service

Project

Stay Finance

WEBSITE

stayfinance.com.au

4,166% Increase in Organic Leads

Stay Finance recorded a 4,166% increase in organic leads, the clearest possible signal that search visibility had been converted into commercial outcomes rather than vanity numbers. Instead of chasing rankings for their own sake, the campaign was built to intercept Australians at the exact moment they were searching for a fast, transparent loan solution, and to make applying the obvious next step once they landed.

(Within 6 Months)

Results Achieved

160%

Increase in Organic Traffic

166%

Increase in New Visitors

113%

Increase in Organic Events

4,166%

Increase in Organic Leads

Challenges

Competing in one of Australia’s most crowded search markets.

Personal and short-term lending is dominated by established lenders, comparison sites and aggregators with deep budgets and long-standing domain authority, leaving a newer fintech brand fighting for visibility against incumbents on every high-intent query.

Technical and user experience barriers were capping performance.

Site structure, crawlability, and on-site UX issues meant search engines were not seeing or valuing the pages that mattered most, while visitors who did arrive weren’t being guided cleanly toward an application.

Organic visibility wasn’t translating into enquiries.

Traffic alone was never the goal. Without content mapped to genuine borrower intent, the site struggled to move visitors from “researching options” to “starting an application,” and lead volume sat well below the site’s potential.

A trust-sensitive category with no shortcuts.

In regulated finance, borrowers scrutinise credibility before they submit a single detail. Stay Finance needed the kind of authority signals Google and consumers both respond to, and no reliable way to build them at scale.

Strategy

We started with the foundations.

Every campaign begins with a comprehensive website audit, and Stay Finance was no exception. Rather than guessing at what was holding performance back, we systematically diagnosed the site, identifying the technical SEO and user experience issues that were quietly suppressing visibility. This mattered because in a category this competitive, no amount of content investment pays off if search engines can’t crawl, understand, and index the pages properly. The audit gave us a prioritised roadmap instead of a to-do list.

Then we rebuilt the structure.

We restructured the website and optimised internal linking so that the site’s hierarchy actually reflected how borrowers search and how Google evaluates topical relevance. Internal linking is one of the most underused levers in SEO: when done well, it distributes authority from stronger pages to the commercially important ones, clarifies which pages are the definitive answer for a given query, and shortens the path from the landing page to the application. Alongside this, we improved crawlability and indexation, ensuring Google’s resources were spent on the pages capable of driving revenue, not lost on low-value URLs. These fixes were the reason later content and link investment compounded rather than leaked away.

Next, we made the site genuinely useful.

We published high-quality, user-focused content built around search intent and current industry trends, not keyword-stuffed filler. In lending, a searcher comparing loan options, checking eligibility, or trying to understand fees is at a very different stage from someone ready to apply, and each needs a different answer. Aligning content with those intents built topical authority in the eyes of search engines while doing the harder commercial job: answering the questions that stand between a borrower and an application. This is a large part of why the growth showed up in leads and organic events, not just sessions, and it contributed to a stronger set of keywords holding positions in the top 10.

Finally, we credibly built authority.

We launched a targeted digital PR and backlink outreach campaign to earn quality backlinks from relevant, authoritative sources. In a YMYL (“Your Money or Your Life”) category like finance, where Google applies heightened scrutiny to trust and credibility signals, links from reputable publications do double duty; they strengthen domain authority and reinforce the brand legitimacy that borrowers look for before handing over personal information. Rather than chasing volume, the campaign prioritised relevance and quality, which is precisely what allowed a challenger brand to start winning positions against far more established competitors.

The Game Plan Behind
Stay Finance's Digital Win

Once we understood the competitive lending landscape and how Australian borrowers actually search, we audited the site end-to-end and mapped out the right mix of technical SEO, UX fixes, content and authority-building tactics to close the gap on established players.

From there, we restructured the website, sharpened internal linking, and resolved the crawlability and indexation issues holding the site back — then layered in intent-driven content so search engines could find, understand and rank the pages Stay Finance's customers were already searching for.

We then executed a focused digital PR and outreach campaign to earn authoritative backlinks, strengthening domain authority in a trust-critical category and converting that hard-won visibility into a steady, trackable flow of organic leads.

Results

Over six months of consistent, ongoing SEO, Stay Finance achieved:

4,166% increase in Organic Leads
166% increase in New Visitors
160% increase in Organic Traffic
113% increase in Organic Events
Improved organic keyword positions within the top 10 of search results
Growth driven entirely by compounding organic performance — with the foundations in place to keep scaling

The headline number is the lead growth. Organic traffic up 160% and new visitors up 166% show the audience was found; organic events up 113% show they engaged; and a 4,166% lift in organic leads shows they converted. That’s the difference between an SEO campaign that looks good in a report and one that shows up in the business.