Hero Housing Finance is an NBFC operating in the competitive Indian home loan market. Unlike the big banks and established housing finance companies it competes against (Bajaj Housing Finance, LIC Housing, PNB Housing, HDFC, and a clutch of aggressive smaller players like Aavas Finance and Home First Finance), Hero Housing Finance didn’t have the luxury of decades of brand equity driving organic traffic.
When Justwords came on board in October 2022, the brief was clear: build organic visibility from the ground up, generate qualified traffic, and ultimately drive home loan inquiries through content and SEO. Simple to state. Hard to execute in a sector where every keyword of value is already being fought over by brands with far deeper pockets and far longer digital histories.
1. Zero head start:
In October 2022, the website had 7,141 organic users – modest numbers for a financial brand trying to compete nationally. There was no established content library, no keyword authority, and no backlink profile to build on. The previous agency had moved the needle only marginally.
2. A fiercely contested SERP:
Home loan keywords in India are some of the most expensive and competitive in the country. Bajaj Finserv, SBI, HDFC Bank, and LIC Housing – these brands have SEO teams, enormous content budgets, and years of domain authority. Getting a relatively young NBFC into the same rankings requires a sharper, more targeted strategy than throwing content at high-volume head terms.
3. A technically broken website:
This one almost derailed the entire effort before it started. The website was rendered using Client-Side Rendering (CSR) rather than Server-Side Rendering (SSR), which meant search engine crawlers were largely unable to read the page content. The site was also JavaScript-heavy, compounding the problem. Until this was addressed, even excellent content would have been largely invisible to Google. Solving the technical foundation was a prerequisite to everything else.
4.Time-sensitive content needs:
Tax season, RBI rate decisions, government housing scheme updates – these topics spike in search volume at specific windows. Missing the window means missing the traffic. The content operation needed to be responsive, not just planned.
Before content strategy, keyword research and content creation, we had to fix what was broken. The CSR rendering issue was flagged early and escalated. Getting this resolved was the essential first step.
Rather than defaulting to high-volume keywords that the big players already dominated, we conducted a thorough content gap analysis, identifying topics where search demand existed but credible, well-optimised content from competitors was thin. These gaps became the editorial roadmap.
The insight that shaped everything: in the home loan space, a large share of search intent is informational rather than transactional. People are trying to understand EMI calculations, prepayment implications, tax benefits under Section 80C and 24(b), eligibility criteria, and city-specific property rates. Winning this informational layer earns the trust that eventually converts.
One of the highest-impact decisions was building a Home Loan Prepayment Calculator as a dedicated, well-optimised page. It was designed from the ground up to rank for high-intent, non-branded keywords around home loan prepayment. It worked. Multiple related keywords now rank in the top 3 positions, and the page has become one of the primary drivers of non-branded organic traffic to the site.
Similarly, the Home Loan EMI Calculator was developed and optimised as a lead magnet, capturing users at a high-intent moment in their home loan research journey and creating a natural path to inquiry.
Home loans are inherently local decisions. A buyer in Jaipur has different market considerations than one in Pune. We built city-targeted landing pages optimised for localised home loan searches – “home loan in [city]”, “housing finance near me.” This captured intent that national, generic pages simply cannot serve.
One of the clearest signals from the first year was that tax-related content dramatically outperformed most other topics. Blogs covering home loan tax benefits, Section 80C deductions, HRA vs home loan claims, and interest deduction limits attracted disproportionate traffic, particularly between January and March. We doubled down on this cluster, building a comprehensive library that now ranks well across multiple tax-related home loan queries.
A significant share of India’s home loan seekers research in Hindi. Publishing a stream of Hindi-language blogs opened up a parallel organic channel that English-only content would never have accessed, expanding the total addressable audience meaningfully.
Authority-building ran alongside every content effort: 81 off-page articles, 15 infographics, 102 free guest posts, 146 business listing submissions (against a plan of 72), and 852 content syndications (against a plan of 36 – a 23x overdelivery enabled by expanded distribution channels unlocked mid-campaign). Each channel contributed to a backlink profile that gave the on-page content the domain authority needed to compete.
The home loan content space has no shortage of mediocre content. Every NBFC and bank publishes blog posts on EMI calculations and tax benefits. What separates content that ranks from content that doesn’t is specificity, depth, and strategic targeting. That means finding the gaps the bigger players haven’t bothered to fill, and filling them properly.
The calculator pages are a good illustration of this thinking. Building a prepayment calculator as a standalone, SEO-optimised page with the right keyword architecture, internal linking, and user experience turned it into one of the site’s most valuable traffic assets. That’s the difference between content as output and content as strategy.
Hero Housing Finance’s results were built over time, through consistent execution of a strategy grounded in real audience insight. That's how sustainable organic traffic works.
If you're an NBFC, bank, or financial services brand that knows content should be working harder for you, let's start with an honest conversation about where you are and what's possible.
Call us at 9910203445 or write to sales@justwords.in.
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