The Cherry Creek Mortgage Company

A Marketing Story by The Gray Dot Company about Cherry Creek Mortgage

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Cherry Creek Mortgage

Increase Brand Awareness

Challenge

In early 2017, the team at Cherry Creek Mortgage Company approached The Gray Dot Company to support the rebranding and platform migration of their corporate enterprise website. Their goal was to keep and grow their existing organic traffic numbers through a well-researched, effective SEO strategy. Despite their progress up to this point, their ranking keywords were not connected to a well-defined objective. As a result, the majority of their organic traffic was not converting into sales or other meaningful outcomes.The Gray Dot Company sought to lay a strong foundation for a data-driven strategy and technical SEO plan CCMC could use to laser-focus their goals. Because the project exceeded expectations, CCMC asked for our help to redesign and deploy all of their existing mortgage lending brands as well as over 150 entirely new ones, including Blue Spot Home Loans, Pentrust Mortgage Company, a variety of Loan Officer-specific vanity sites, and more. Since then, we have shifted our focus to ongoing enterprise SEO consulting. Our goal: fulfill their technical, strategic, and content search engine optimization needs at a high level across all subdivisions at scale.

Solution

Key SEO/Client Concerns: -Locality-specific keyword research & targeting -On-domain and cross-domain duplicate content -Thin” content pages in need of optimizing -Scalable GA tracking and event/conversion tracking -Opinionated internal stakeholders who a) want different things to be done in different ways and b) often compete with each other for the same leads rather than bring in their own separate piece of the pie -Positive coordination & cooperation with CCMC's large internal marketing strategy & content creation teams - be a partner, not a barrier To supercharge traffic and manage the needs of their wide variety of platforms, we created a central decision-making platform. From there we could visualize, plan for, and prevent common stumbling blocks hyper-growth companies typically experience. Problems such as deploying content across all owned sites without creating duplication issues and limiting unnecessary complexities with maintenance (plus technical debt) were high on our list of priorities. Next, we worked intimately with CCMC’s development team to create a unique plan that defined when and where site-specific customizations were needed. We streamlined how we could replicate solutions across their 100+ properties. We also found other areas in which we could depend on pattern matching dynamic variables to create mid-level customization. Along the way, we were asked to negotiate the needs of various stakeholders. Each contributor had their own agenda and desires, which often directly conflicted with one another. To get everyone on the same page we led strategic conversations on meeting those needs, actively discussing and managing each member’s concerns along the way. In the end, we were able to devise solutions that both put CCMC’s best interests front and center while also leaving our group of opinionated stakeholders happy with the outcome. Afterward, we clearly defined MVP launch and post-launch standards. With this unifying foundation established, we worked to further improve customization for individual websites. Throughout this entire months-long process we kept a keen eye on steady and sustainable organic search growth that would bring in the high-quality targeted leads CCMC needed to skyrocket their goals. Additional SEO Projects: ‍Backlink Audit & ongoing disavow process Link Building Strategy Algorithm update monitoring Content strategy support: quality content creation, planning, and on-page optimization of existing content. E-A-T audit & recommendations Google Analytics & Tag Manager Audit & maintenance

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)