The payday loans industry continues to be a lucrative and popular sector in the UK.
With Google’s SERPs overwhelmed with black hat SEO and hacked sites, the search engine giant responded with a unique payday loans algorithm, which they have continued to develop and refine since 2013, as touched upon in the payday loans algorithm review from last year[1].
Never before had Google dedicated an entire algorithm[2] to one particular product so openly, and at the time it was considered ground-breaking.
However, since my last piece, the industry has seen further challenges and changes and this has had a profound impact on the companies that rank and the type of search terms that we see.
Notably, the rise in compensation claims has seen the casualty of four of the UK’s largest lenders and this has opened up the market for other lenders and brokers to capture up to one million more leads that were previously unattainable. So getting to page one for “payday loans” is still very hot on the agenda for a lot of companies and new entrants.
How to rank for payday loans in 2019
Content
The use of fresh content is important, as it is for most industries and services. Specifically, for payday loans, the use of quality landing pages[3] (rather than a homepage) is more effective to rank for key terms. Across the top 20 search positions, only three are using their homepage to rank, with 17 using devoted landing pages which either use /payday-loans/, /payday-loans-uk/ or /payday-loans-alternative/.
Whilst mentioning the use of alternatives was very popular last year, this is now only mentioned in two meta-titles across