Industry Analysis – Online Presence in the Invoice Finance Sector

Invoice finance is a form of short-term borrowing often used to improve a company’s working capital and cash flow position. This provides a valuable service to businesses as it allows them to draw money against sales before the customer has paid. As a result this means an improved cash flow as well as the benefit of only paying interest on the amount borrowed.With this particular form of business finance undergoing a boom period, we decided to take a look at the top keyword trends and ranking positions to help  identify the major online players and the challenges they face – here’s what we found out…

Keyword Trends

From the graph above we can clearly see how from 2007 on-wards the key term within this particular area of finance has been that of  ‘invoice finance’. ‘Invoice discounting’ has hit a 30% decrease in search in the 4 year period between December 2008 and December 2012.

From the second graph we can see how popular invoice financing has become leading searches over the likes of other related terms and services such as ‘invoice factoring’, ‘asset based lending’ and ‘invoice discounting’.

Keyword Ranking Analysis

Above we can see the top financial organisations and how they compare against each other regarding keyword ranking positions for the industry top terms. The big banks such as Barclay’s and Lloyds TSB find themselves well behind their competitors when it comes to featuring in the prime positions on Google search. From the keywords chosen Aldermore, RBS and Close overall hold the key positions in search – RBS and Aldermore are the only companies to have a 100% share of the chosen keywords ranking within the top 10 on Google.

Keyword Ranking % on Google page one

1. RBS – 100%
2. Aldermore – 100%
3. Close – 80%
4. HSBC – 60%
5. Bibby Financial – 60%
6. Barclays – 0%
7. Lloyds TSB – 0%

What’s interesting to see from this  is how smaller brands have been able to penetrate the top positions on Google above much larger and well known Banking organisations.

Keyword Volume Analysis

This penetration from smaller financial companies into the top places on Google becomes increasingly significant when we study the graph above which highlights the search volume for the keywords highlighted. ‘Invoice finance’ has over 1,000 monthly searches and when we study the keyword difficulty score (44%) we can understand why only 4 out of the 7 brands chosen have pages which rank for the term in the top 10. Another interesting factor here is how each brand will expect different traffic volumes on Bing and Google with ‘Invoice finance’ possessing the highest search volume on Bing (473) and ‘Invoice factoring’ being the number one search term regarding volume on Google (4,614). What’s more is how much larger the total search volume for the terms is on Google compared to Bing (7,171) and (1,221) respectively – this will certainly cause these companies to direct their attentions more to Google, increasing the competition.

Finally, another curious point to raise is how for several of these keywords RBS is able to rank for several pages on their site within the first page of Google. For instance ‘Invoice financing’ (see results 7, 8 and 9):

What’s clear from the graph is how page Page Authority plays a key role in the search listings for this particular keyword, with general rule being the higher the authority the higher the listing. The number of root domains linking to the page seems to offer a heavy weight when we assess the rankings for this keyword with domain authority seemingly holding less of a weight. Finally, when we  compare result number 6 and 10, we see how increasing the number of root domains linking to the root domain doesn’t necessarily appear too effective in comparison to the other ranking factors here.