I took Rise Funding, a UK commercial finance broker, from a dead domain to over 2,000 organic clicks and 60+ finance applications a month in one of the UK’s most competitive search markets (finance). The company has now also crossed seven figures in annual revenue. This has been one of my best and most enjoyable case studies, and I'm still growing with this client today. I have also created over 30 newsletters and two podcast episodes.
Caleb Hinton
14 min read
14 min read
An ongoing content and SEO engagement with Rise Funding. This engagement is built on a foundation of high-authority content for a fast-moving business loan brokerage.
Rise Funding has seen great success since its inception in 2022, crossing one million in annual revenue in 2026. Our engagement has run alongside this success.
Organic search grew from zero to around 2,000 clicks a month
That traffic now drives 60+ applications a month through the Instant Quote tool
Roughly 1 in every 28 organic visitors (about 3.5%) goes on to apply for finance
A Knowledge Hub of 100+ articles, published on a steady weekly cadence
Rankings across product, sector and government-scheme searches, from invoice finance to the Growth Guarantee Scheme
Rise Funding is a London-based commercial finance broker, authorised by the FCA and NACFB Assured. It helps UK SMEs find business loans, invoice finance, asset finance, VAT loans and property finance of up to £750,000.
Its core conversion point is the Instant Quote tool. A business owner enters how much they need, their turnover and their trading history, and Rise Funding compares lenders on their behalf before collating their business information and assisting them with their application process.
The main benefit of this business is the support that it provides to SMEs.
SMEs can often find the loans industry daunting and inaccessible. Large industry lenders make most of their income from larger businesses, so they make no accommodations for smaller businesses. Often, they will even deny applications that are not from a broker.
A broker such as Rise Funding allows access to the lending industry for smaller businesses, offers advice and support in the application process, and often charges no additional fees.
When Rise Funding came to us, they faced three problems:
Organic search was bringing in nothing. The site had the product pages and the Instant Quote form, but almost no one was finding it through Google. Domain was dead, and the site had zero traffic. Leads were relied upon through providers or advertising.
Business finance is one of the most competitive search markets in the UK. High-street banks, challenger lenders and big comparison sites all chase the same terms. A new business cannot outrank them on "business loans" alone.
Low trust. Business loan brokers in some industries have a poor reputation – based on the suspicion that they will just "get the loan over the line", regardless of the benefit to the client. Despite the fact that Rise Funding already had outstanding (4.9/5) reviews on Trustpilot, the trust for this kind of business was low, so our task was to reassure prospects of the legitimacy of Rise Funding.
When we started in January 2025, all SEO tools showed effectively no organic clicks. By the end of 2025, the site was earning around 2,000-3,000 clicks a month from Google and AI search.
Ahrefs (October 2026)
That growth came purely from content, with no spend on ads. Every article we publish keeps ranking and keeps sending visitors after the month it goes live.
Today, organic visitors submit on average 60 Instant Quote applications a month. Each one is a business owner who has told Rise Funding how much they need, what they turn over and when they need it.
Put another way, about 3.5% of organic visitors make an application when they visit a website. For a broker, that is a sales team's worth of qualified conversations arriving every month without a single outbound call.
GA4 results (October 2026)
Rise Funding now ranks for searches across its whole product range. That includes product terms like invoice finance and VAT loans, sector terms like care home finance and construction loans, and scheme terms like the Growth Guarantee Scheme.
Ahrefs (October 2026)
"High-quality financial articles and email marketing services from Caleb have been hugely beneficial for our brand presence. Our brand trust has been established across multiple platforms, and also helped our site go from zero traffic to over 2,000 organic clicks per month."
Willem van Lynden – Managing Director of Rise Funding.
A breakdown of how we achieved these results and built trust.
From day one, we organised strategy calls to discover what industries Rise Funding served and what the clients were really after. Prospects will rarely search for 'business loan', but often search for anxieties around their business, or specific business information.
This shaped the content calendar, and we were able to produce articles that hit specific high-volume terms.
Product guides that explain each type of finance and who it suits, from construction loans to the tax treatment of business loans
Sector content for industries with specific funding pressures, such as care home finance and business rates relief for retailers
Government scheme content that captures demand when policy changes, such as how to apply for the Growth Guarantee Scheme
Each article answers the reader's question properly, then shows how Rise Funding can help. Every one routes to Instant Quote.
Nobody knows the business better than a founder, so having interviews and regular catch-ups is essential. We schedule strategy calls with the founder, where all expertise is recorded via Granola and analysed for content ideas.
Business finance content fails when it reads like it was researched in an afternoon. Our team has worked in-house at Barclays, Paysafe and Tide, so we write about lending products from the inside.
That means getting the detail right: eligibility, security, rates, repayment terms and what lenders look for. We are writing for an FCA-regulated broker, so every claim has to stand up.
SEO compounds. We set a minimum weekly article cadence and held it, building the Knowledge Hub to more than 100 articles.
A shared content calendar tracks each piece from keyword to live, so nothing stalls between brief and publication. Alongside the articles, we run weekly LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube posts and a fortnightly email newsletter to keep the brand visible.
Rise Funding email newsletter (October 2026)
You can't build on sand with SEO. If the site is broken or slow, SEO will never work. We fixed all issues on the site and ensured load speed was as low as possible. Crawl depth was an issue, which we fixed with reorganisation of the pages and adding pagination.
On Rise Funding's WordPress site, we organised the Knowledge Hub into clear categories, linked articles to the relevant product pages and set up support for Google's Preferred Sources, so readers can choose to see Rise Funding more often in their results.
We made sure that the Health Score on Ahrefs is as high as possible, which can be a challenge, particularly with a complicated site:
Ahrefs (October 2026)
To increase domain authority, backlinks are essential. We paid for a few backlinks manually, and a few were automated. The paid backlink was in an industry magazine, which increased the domain authority slightly; however, this had minimal effect for the cost.
Our strategy changed to fit the new AI-dominated world of SEO, which was to include statistics in every single one of our articles. AI is known to parse articles and also skim-read them, often picking up on key statistics. Therefore, in each introductory section, we included the most relevant statistics and data that would back up each point, and attract backlinks.
https://risefunding.co.uk/is-a-business-loan-100-tax-deductible/
The result was an enormous increase in genuine, high-quality backlinks and domain authority.
Ahrefs (October 2026)
Rise Funding went from a site Google barely noticed to one that brings in 60+ finance applications a month. This was in one of the most competitive industries in SEO.
It worked because we focused on the more niche financial topics, took the time to understand exactly what prospects required, wrote with real financial services knowledge, and published every week. The content we have built keeps ranking and keeps converting, month after month.
Want the same for your fintech or financial services brand?
Book a call with us, and we will show you where your next 60 applications could come from.
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Finnus LTD.
Company Registration Number (CRN): 15704119
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2026
