Don’t worry. There are still plenty of marketing ideas that will boost your bottom line. From content marketing to social media, there’s a wide range of options to help your business compete with the 80,000+ credit repair companies in the US alone.
Follow along as we go through six of the top credit repair marketing ideas for this increasingly crowded industry.
- Build trust and brand reputation with a social media presence
- Get published in local newspapers, online publications, and industry associations
- Use SEO to improve your website’s visibility in search engines
- Create and maintain a Google My Business profile for local SEO
- Use industry directories to draw in local clientele
- Start content marketing with a blog to improve your online presence
1. Build trust and brand reputation with a strong social media presence
You might think social media isn’t that important among all credit repair marketing ideas, but it’s an extremely valuable tool for building trust with clients and the community,
Social media is the ultimate way to humanize and promote your business free of cost. Your credit repair business should use every type of social media platform that customers use, from Linkedin to Instagram.
Finding what to post can be a challenge, but if you don’t have a consistent social media presence across all platforms by now, you’re behind the ball.
Hashtag research for credit repair companies
If you are new to social media, finding what to post on each platform is difficult. You want to establish a consistent tone and voice for your business across all platforms, but you also have to take advantage of what each platform does best.
For example, when deciding what to post on Instagram, you might want to consider using hashtag research.
Two of the best tools for Instagram hashtag research are Instagram autocomplete and related hashtags. With these free features, you can tailor your content around trending topics without ever leaving the app.
As you can see below, creditrepair.com uses a number of these hashtags to boost the views for its video post on how much bad credit costs. The post received over 1,500 views in part because of hashtag research that allowed people to find it.
Some of the top trending hashtags for credit repair companies include:
What should you share on social media?
As we’ve seen, sharing videos is a great social media strategy to draw in viewers.
However, for smaller companies producing quality video content can be too expensive. If that’s the case, posting content from a blog is another great social media tactic.
It’s something top industry companies like LexingtonLaw do all the time.
And, for smaller companies, this is an easily replicable strategy that will allow you to improve organic website traffic as well. Here’s an example from Go Clean Credit, where they link to their blog post about credit scores and auto loans.
2. Get published in local newspapers, online publications, and industry associations
Getting valuable content published around the Internet on industry sites is a great way to build brand awareness and improve your website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) with inbound links from relevant, authoritative sites.
Inbound links, or backlinks, indicate the importance and relevance of a website in the eyes of Google. That means they are incredibly important in increasing organic website traffic.
Getting published in these publications isn’t about advertising your services, it’s about informing the public of your brand and simultaneously positioning your company as industry experts. The idea here is to provide a service for the community that, in turn, has a benefit for your website and brand.
You can also get published in local newspapers to help build brand awareness in the local community. This is a great tactic for credit repair businesses that rely so heavily on local clientele.
Going to a local newspaper to ask if you can publish an informative article may sound scary, but it’s very common, so don’t be afraid to ask. Building a relationship with your local newspaper can help establish your business as a part of the local community.
3. Use SEO to improve your website’s visibility in search engines
Credit repair search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing a website’s visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. It’s one of the best ways to drive organic traffic to your website—and, more importantly, convert web visitors into paying customers.
Considering an amazing 93% of global search traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps alone, according to data from Sparktoro, SEO has become an invaluable tool for businesses—especially credit repair businesses who can’t buy Google Ads.
Even if there weren’t advertising restrictions, SEO is still one of the best credit repair marketing ideas. There’s a reason why marketing spending on SEO in the United States alone is projected to reach almost $80 billion in 2020. It’s very effective
In fact, according to Google, it can take anywhere from four months to a year to see the results of SEO, but Ahrefs studies have shown that SEO efforts can still be improving a website’s organic results years down the line.
If you’re looking to improve your online presence, here are a few SEO best practices to get you started:
- Produce unique, quality content for a human audience.
- Optimize title and header tags for SEO.
- Remember to include internal links and authoritative external links.
- Track your results with tools like Google Analytics.
- Improve site speed with Google Page Speed Insights.
4. Create and maintain a Google My Business profile for local SEO
Local SEO is the process of increasing a business’ visibility in local search results in Google and on Google Maps. And considering a whopping 46% of all Google queries are looking for local results, that’s pretty valuable.
For credit companies that get so much of their business from local clientele, local SEO is a must.
It all starts with a well maintained Google My Business (GMB) profile.
GMB profiles allow businesses to be featured on Google Maps and in local results.
Why is that so important?
When a potential client searches for credit repair companies near them, they’ll often search keywords like ‘credit repair companies + LOCATION TERM’ to find the best results that they can go to in person.
For example, in the search below for “credit repair companies Chandler, AZ,” Google populates local results that match the query.
The section appears above all organic search results and just below paid results, making it prime online ‘real estate’ for businesses looking to secure local clientele.
Plus, GMB profiles also allow your business to be featured in Google Maps. With proper local SEO efforts, you can reach the first page of results, like our client Go Clean Credit has here.ww
5. Use general and industry directories to draw in local clientele
One of the key tactics of local SEO, other than GMB profiles, is building citations.
Citations are online references to a business that usually include a name, address, and phone number (NAP) and sometimes include a backlink, a map, or even business reviews. What are backlinks? They are inbound links from an external website back to yours.
Citations are a great way to build your brand awareness and authority, while also improving what is called domain authority.
Domain authority has to do with the number of relevant, authoritative backlinks your website has: the more, the better in the eyes of Google.
And directories are one of the best ways to get these links and put your business NAP out there as much as possible.
There are two types of directories. First, there are general directories like Bing Places for Business, Yelp, and the Better Business Bureau.
These are spots that any business can land a citation and start building some prominence in the community. Here’s an example where a client of ours, Go Clean Credit, secured a citation in the BBB.
Then there are industry-specific credit repair directories that only list credit repair companies. These directories are better for drawing in potential clients who may use these directories to sort through and find the best credit repair companies.
For example, on creditrepairdirectory.org, you can land a citation next to thousands of other credit repair companies. However, these citations will usually cost you, while many general directories are free.
6. Start content marketing with a blog to improve your online presence
Improving your online presence is all about creating valuable, informative content, and then getting it in the hands of the right audience.
It all starts with content marketing (and the right website template). And even in 2020, the easiest and most effective form of content marketing is blogging.
Although video has taken over as the number one form of media content used in marketing, blogging has some distinct advantages.
- It can be used more readily as a part of an SEO content strategy.
- The barriers to entry are far lower. Video requires more software, more knowledge, and more time.
- Blogging allows for more inbound links to your website.
- Companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month according to data from DemandMetric.
This fact isn’t lost on the biggest credit repair companies in the industry. Just take a look at LexingtonLaw, for example. They maintain an active blog covering a variety of credit-related topics to draw in organic traffic.
And here’s Creditrepair.com’s blog. Another industry giant, creditrepair.com, updates its blog multiple times a week to keep organic traffic flowing.
No Google Ads, but plenty of digital marketing options for credit repair companies
Google Ads may have been a key source of online traffic in the past, but now credit repair companies are having to think outside the box.
Hopefully, these tips will help your business replace the lost online traffic from Google Ads. If not, you can always call in the experts. We’d be more than happy to get you started with the best credit repair marketing ideas that can turn your business around and make you forget all about Google Ads.
Markitors is a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO. We help small businesses rank higher on Google to get more traffic to their websites and increase revenue. Explore what’s in our SEO toolbox: audits and keyword research, digital PR, technical SEO, and local SEO.
