Organic SEO and Website Speed Improvements for The Cash Company

  thecashcompany.com

Locally owned and operated, The Cash Company provides customers in East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia with payday loans, cash advances, check advances, auto loans, and more.

In 2024, Intellithought worked with The Cash Company to enhance their existing website to improve organic SEO performance. The focus of this project was centered around the following initiatives: search engine optimization of content, performance and speed enhancements, and creating service area landing pages.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

To improve the volume and quality of organic traffic flowing to The Cash Company’s website, we made strategic content improvements using researched keywords and enhanced the existing site structure to align with semantic best practices.

We made the following Search Engine Optimizations:

• Added H1 tags to missing page headers
• Created targeted meta descriptions and titles for key pages
• Added alt text to media
• Improved key page’s content using researched keywords and highlighting service areas
• Added additional relevant content to pages with low word count
• Fixed SSL mixed content warnings and forced SSL site-wide
• Added FAQ entries with FAQ structured data
• Set up Google Tag for Form Submission Tracking of loan applications
• Converted Privacy Policy info from a static PDF to a page that can be crawled
• Submitted the updated XML sitemap to Google and Bing to speed up the indexing of the new updates

Organic traffic and keyword results before and after enhancements

Graph showing improvements in number of issues and pages crawled before and after enhancements

Google Search Console improvement in search visibility over 90 days since enhancements

Search example showing results in Google 3-Pack and organic listing

Featured snippet result for question asked on Google search

Pingdom performance grade before and after enhancements

Performance and Speed Improvements

Intellithought made enhancements to the website to increase speed including optimizing images, minifying CSS and JS, moving page render blocking content, and implementing server-side caching. In addition, we also performed an audit of the existing website’s plugins and theme features to find opportunities to remove unnecessary bulk and reduce the number of requests site-wide.

As a result, the performance grades of the website improved on the following testing platforms:

• Google Pagespeed Insights
  • Mobile device grade (before): 42%
  • Mobile device grade (after): 95%
• Pingdom website speed test
  • Grade (before): 77% – C
  • Grade (after): 98% – A
• GTmetrix website performance test
  • Grade (before): 67% – C
  • Grade (after): 99% – A

Service Area Pages

To improve local SEO visibility, Intellithought created Service Area Pages (SAP) using a list of key cities and zip codes provided by The Cash Company. Depending on how a user searches, Service Area Pages (SAP) can be an alternative to the homepage and an additional entry point to the website. As a result, someone searching for a service that The Cash Company provides in a particular area may find the corresponding SAP before the homepage in search listings.