The private student loan company is competing for search presence on the topic of student loans with large players such as Sallie Mae, SoFi, and Earnest. These competitors have a very wide range of content around the topic of student loans that they rank for, which has given them credibility with search engines and LLMs. In order to compete, they needed a better ranking for its existing content and internal linking structure that would signal authority to search engines and LLM crawlers.
In collaboration with our client, we built a hub and spoke content strategy around the topic of Private student loans. We were able to build 162 optimized content pieces, and re-optimize 62 existing content pages on the site. We also acquired 455 high quality backlinks that are strategically pointed to pages that will improve our visibility in Search for student loan related keywords.
At the midway point of 2025, our client had a total of about 20 owned citations and 35 brand mentions in AI Search.
As a result of these efforts, they now own:
111
pages being cited in Google’s AI Overview
Nearly 160
brand mentions for terms related to student loans
The sum of the search volume for these queries totals around 300K additional monthly search impressions for the brand
