Driving Transformational Growth for Bajaj Finserv’s Bill Payments Service (BBPS)

Introduction

Techmagnate won the mandate for Bajaj Finserv, a leading Non-Banking Financial Corporation (NBFC) in India. When they approached us, the NBFC was making a foray into the world of online payments and looked to us for help to increase their visibility and establish top-of-the-mind recall for their bill payments offering.

The Bharat Bill Payments System, or BBPS, is an RBI-mandated system that facilitates bill payments across various billing categories. These include services like water, electricity, gas cylinder bookings, mobile recharges, and DTH payments. BBPS is a safe, reliable, and convenient customer payments platform that can be accessed anytime and anywhere.

The Initial Challenges

When we began work on the account, the BBPS functionality was available on the app but was missing on the brand’s website.

Moreover, when Bajaj Finserv entered the bill payments space, the category was already dominated by heavyweights like Paytm, Mobikwik, and Freecharge, amongst others.

Additionally, they had very little visibility on SERPs for their bill payments because they didn’t have enough pages on their website catering to these services.

Essentially, the audience our clients needed wasn’t aware of the services they provided.

Our primary job was to carve out a strategy that would have Bajaj Finserv dominating SERPs and increase their exposure with a larger audience.

Campaign Strategies Innovations

From the outset, we were aware of how much market share the Fintech giants held with regard to online bill payments. So, while we adopted an aggressive strategy for moving forward, we also decided to focus on one key approach, i.e. web dominance. We would take a web-forward stance to increase Bajaj Finserv’s visibility, rankings, traffic, and ultimately, audience adoption for their bill payments service.

1. Market Research to Identify the Search Universe

We identified a staggering 10,500+ set of keywords with a total search volume of 82,161,410 searches per month. These keywords covered searches for 20 services in total across 49 Indian cities and included more than 1,000 billers. Since hundreds of categories exist for payments, we focused on the 20 most popular ones, which included electricity bill payments (3,610 keywords, 40.96 Million Search Volume) and mobile recharges (1,580 keywords, 15.25 Million Search Volume).

2. Content Development

Our market and keyword research revealed multiple content opportunities we could capitalize on, so we created specific and comprehensive clusters for different services. We took our time to closely understand customer journeys, e.g. with the electricity bill payments and the mobile recharge services.

Our client’s competitors, like Paytm, had biller and service pages that were already dominating SERPs; we realized that competing against those pages would be difficult without creating topical authority. Therefore, to address topical authority, we created 600 pages of supporting content – and to increase our click-through-rates (CTRs) from SERPs, we focused on increasing our share of page on search results.

We put in additional effort for targeting Google’s Featured Snippets (FS) by providing clear, reliable information on our pages; we targeted the People Also Ask (PAA) section by seeding our pages with relevant Frequently Asked Questions about available plans, information about local services, and more. Our efforts paid off. Our content began ranking, we increased our share of page, and increased our CTRs to the site.

3. Local Search Optimization

We found that the Bajaj Finserv site did not have any pages targeting local searches, which was a substantial opportunity for us. Since our audience was spread across India, a localized SEO strategy was essential for leading our campaign. We identified 1300 keywords targeting local searches – for electricity bill payments and mobile recharges – with a monthly Search Volume of 6,00,000. We created state and city-specific pages for all biller categories and optimized them for each step of the user journey.

4. Improved the Customer Journey

Design plays a critical role in creating a smooth user journey and increasing user engagement on a website. When user engagement increases, the website’s bounce rate decreases, consequently creating a positive impact on rankings and traffic – it’s the positive infinite loop every digital marketer wants. Because we had analyzed our customer journey so closely, we were able to create a seamless user experience focused on resolving customer issues and establishing trust.

We made it easy for our users to transact on the web and gave them the option of redirecting to our client’s app if they chose to make payments there. For example, with electricity bill payments, we provided easily accessible information for billers in every state and simplified the number of steps required to select the biller and make the payment. With mobile recharges, we made it easy for customers to find and pay for the recharge plans they needed. All of these activations led to users staying more engaged on our site.

Campaign Results

Techmagnate’s campaign strategies, innovation, and execution aligned together and bore fruit for Bajaj Finserv.

• The brand dominated Google search results with more than 6200 keywords ranking with a Search Volume of 36.85 Million in the Top 10 search results.
• Many ranking keywords were for the most popular and competitive searches – e.g.> “jio recharge”, “airtel recharge”, “UPI full form”, “how to check electricity bill online” – and many others with multiple results in Google searches.
• We saw a 7.6x increase in annual organic traffic by the end of the year (Apr’23-Mar’24). Meanwhile, the monthly traffic has grown by 26x (Mar’23 vs. Mar’24).
• By March’24, we had driven hundreds of thousands of transactions through Bajaj Finserv’s website leading to a 30x growth over the previous year and many more through the app.

Keywords Ranking Comparison: March’23 vs. March’24

Keywords Ranking Comparison: Bajaj Finserv vs. Paytm

Sample Set of Ranking Keywords