Organic Traffic and Sales from Tier 2 & 3 Cities (Semi-Urban & Rural Areas): Bajaj Finserv

About the Client

Bajaj Finserv Limited is the holding company for the businesses dealing with financial services of the Bajaj Group. It independently runs the core businesses of Lending, Insurance and Wealth Advisory. Bajaj Finance Limited is the consumer finance lending arm of Bajaj Finserv Limited.

It is the most diversified retail-focused NBFC in the country and the largest financier of consumer durables. Bajaj Finance Limited prides itself for holding the highest credit rating of FAAA/Stable for any NBFC in the country today.

The Challenge

The daunting challenge for Bajaj Finserv was though they have been successful in driving online traffic and sales from Tier 1 and metro cities. But, their penetration in Tier 2 & Tier 3 or semi urban & rural areas, was less.

“The client’s primary aim was to generate traffic and sales from organic search, beyond the metro and tier 1 cities.”

The challenges for generate organic traffic and were –

• Identifying effective methods and approaches to improve reach to semi urban and rural customers
• Strategies and channels to be used to bring about focused traffic from wider targeted areas
• How to leverage local organic searches to increase traffic from the targeted cities.
• Maintaining comparable cost of acquisition
• Targeting unexplored cities to support substantial business growth
• Building a loyal base of customers

The Solution

Backed by intensive research and planning, the first step was to undertake an in-depth competitor analysis. We did a thorough analysis of those competitors who were successfully targeting the Tier 2 cities and beyond.

Organic search strategies –

• Identifying list of cities and planning phase-wise distribution for different set of cities
• Analyzing the search and language preferences & identifying key phrases
• Dedicated pages for each city with location-specific content addressing all possible search queries for the region, to bring-in the right users
• Supporting pages and content in different formats like images, infographics, videos, etc
• Identifying platforms used by the target audience; and using potential channels to promote the different formats of content for interactive user experience

The Outcome

The website was ranking in top with almost all the generic product (short tail) and intent based phrases (long tail) in 30 odd cities and areas. There was an exponential increase in share of voice in top 3, 5 and top 10 results and organic traffic from the tier 2 and tier 3 cities, on the overall website became 2x.

Campaign-Specific Results

Personal Loan

The number of keywords ranking in Top 10 results saw a substantial increase in targeted cities

Traffic from tier 2, tier 3 and beyond

• 526% growth in organic traffic, from Aug 16 to Jul 18
• 190% growth in organic traffic,Year on Year i.e. Aug17-Jul 18 compared to Aug16-Jul 17.
• Percentage share of organic traffic from tier 2, tier 3 and beyond out of total organic traffic increase from 14% to 21% from Aug 16 to Jul 18

Note – The absolute numbers have been indexed, with Organic Traffic from Tier 2, 3 cities and beyond for Aug-16 set equal to 7.1 in order to facilitate the comparison of growth over 24 months.

Home Loan

The organic search ranking for Home Loan saw a major upward movement in top 10 results targeted cities – Traffic from tier 2, tier 3 and beyond

• 1096% growth in organic traffic, from Aug 16 to Jul 18
• 152% growth in organic traffic,Year on Year i.e. Aug17-Jul 18 compared to Aug16-Jul 17.
• Percentage share of organic traffic from tier 2, tier 3 and beyond out of total organic traffic increase from 15% to 22% from Aug 16 to Jul 18

Note – The absolute numbers have been indexed, with Organic Traffic from Tier 2, 3 cities and beyond for Aug-16 set equal to 8.6 in order to facilitate the comparison of growth over 24 months.

Business Loan

The organic search ranking for Business Loan campaign has seen a surge in top in targeted cities – Traffic from tier 2, tier 3 and beyond

• 635% growth in organic traffic, from Aug 16 to Jul 18
• 73% growth in organic traffic,Year on Year i.e. Aug17-Jul 18 compared to Aug16-Jul 17.
• Percentage share of organic traffic from tier 2, tier 3 and beyond out of total organic traffic increase from 17% to 26% from Aug 16 to Jul 18

Note – The absolute numbers have been indexed, with Organic Traffic from Tier 2, 3 cities and beyond for Aug-16 set equal to 8.6 in order to facilitate the comparison of growth over 24 months.